Associations between customers and solutions

When you create customer records, you create detailed agreement and pricing information for the customer and the services that you expect to provide. By associating customers with solutions, you can provide appropriate and timely responses to those customers.

If the primary customer on a ticket is the same as one of the customers associated with a solution, or if there are no customers associated with a solution, then the solution can be selected and copied to the ticket.

Global and customer-specific solutions

When you associate customers with solutions, you can keep the solution records restricted to the users who have permission to access the data of those customers. You set up user permissions for a customer in the Security Groups (SP) application. There are two types of solutions, global solutions, and customer-specific solutions. Global solutions do not have any customer associations. You can apply global solutions to tickets for any customer, even if the customer has no specific solutions of its own. Customer-specific solutions are relevant only to certain customers. A customer-specific solution can only be applied on a ticket for a customer that is associated with the solution.

Security profiles

When customer-based security profiles are used in the Security Groups (SP) application, users are restricted from viewing and using solutions that are not relevant to them. For example, if a solution is associated with Customer 123, then users can see this solution and apply it to a ticket if they belong to a security group with one of the following settings:

A user who belongs to a security group with the customer setting Authorize Group only for Unrestricted Customer level information selected can view only global solutions.

A user who does not belong to a security group with a customer setting can see global solutions and all customer-specific solutions. Customer-based security profiles create data restrictions, so if no profile is set, then no data is restricted.

If a customer-specific solution has no customers associated with it, then users with a customer-based security profile do not see this solution.

See also

Associate Customers with a Solution