Individual vs. Group provider contacts

An individual providercontact is a contact person and e-mail for one individual person associated with the client's provider. This person can log into the Provider Portal and take care of any orders or requests submitted through Cimpl.

A group provider contact is a mailbox which is accessible for multiple individuals associated with your provider. Usually, this is an enterprise e-mail of some sort (e.g. orders@providername.com), and other e-mails for individuals associated with the provider can be connected to this group contact. This allows for multiple provider contacts to all be connected through one community mailbox, so that any of these individuals can log into the Provider Portal, respond to and work with client requests and orders.

Maintaining historical data

Using the group provider contact can be useful with maintaining accurate historical data. By keeping and maintaining the same group contact that is associated to all of the individual provider contacts, no matter what changes are done, so long as the group contact remains unchanged, history will continue to expand for that same group contact. When an individual provider contact is deleted, or renamed, the history is thus affected since the contact has changed. This makes it more difficult to track what has been done by a specific provider.

Generally, having several individual provider contacts is not the best way to go, in case an agent leaves the company for example, and the e-mail needs to be changed. If any changes are made to an individual contact, or if it is deleted, all of it's associated history is erased. That means that you will lose all activity and actions that were completed by that contact. With a group provider contact, you can add and remove e-mails from the common mailbox as needed, without losing any of it's history. So long as the user itself is not deleted or changed, and is merely unassigned from the group, the history remains intact.

For this reason, it's usually best to create a group provider contact from the start, as a common mailbox. Even if the client doesn't want the Provider Portal, just in case they eventually do, it's better that their common mailbox (e.g. wireless@providername.com) was defined as a group in the first place, so that e-mails can be added and removed as needed. If it was defined as Individual, it cannot be changed to a group contact, and the e-mail cannot be used again as a group contact, which can leave users with a major issue that will involve creating a ticket.

Example: I have a group contact and one of the contacts, John Doe, has changed departments and no longer handles orders. How do I remove him without losing the history of his actions?

Navigate to the Providers section in Cimpl, and open up the group contact (common mailbox) from which you want to remove a user.

Once you're in the group contact, click the x next to the user you want to remove.

Now, the user you've removed has had their relationship with the group contact broken, and they will no longer receive e-mails and requests as part of the common mailbox.

As long as the user itself is not completely deleted, and is not edited or changed in any way, all of John Doe's actions and history completed as part of the common mailbox will still be visible. Everything he has done will still be labelled as done by John Doe in the workorder or quotation history.