When contacts are associated to multiple Companies

I was hoping someone can give me some ideas on best practices for this
situation:

We are recording cases and when possible defining the customer field as
a contact. Many times, consultants will call in for a company
requesting support. We want to track the case as associated to the
Account they are calling from as well as the true person who is calling
in. A consultant would work for a company other than the one they are
representing.

Right now I am having to create that person more than once in order to
associate the case to the caller/contact and the account that they are
representing when they call in.

I thought about using the field responsible contact, but that will not
allow me to select the contact and see cases from the contact entity.

I hate that I have to duplicate the person at multiple companies in
order to see the case from both the account and contact perspective.
How are other people handling this?

chadbuserncsicc
Tue Jun 13 19:06:27 CDT 2006

The 'Customer' lookup field should be the Parent Account. If you are
entering a Contact here then your hierarchy is somewhat off.

You could add consultants and use the 'Case Origin' picklist field to record
the consultant that called it in.

You could then use the 'Responsible Contact' field to record the
contact/true person at the Account/Company.

You could then tie this together with an Advanced Find query for Contacts or
Consultants and related cases. You could even create a custom report or use
the c360 Relationship Explorer.

"heather" wrote:

> I was hoping someone can give me some ideas on best practices for this
> situation:
>
> We are recording cases and when possible defining the customer field as
> a contact. Many times, consultants will call in for a company
> requesting support. We want to track the case as associated to the
> Account they are calling from as well as the true person who is calling
> in. A consultant would work for a company other than the one they are
> representing.
>
> Right now I am having to create that person more than once in order to
> associate the case to the caller/contact and the account that they are
> representing when they call in.
>
> I thought about using the field responsible contact, but that will not
> allow me to select the contact and see cases from the contact entity.
>
> I hate that I have to duplicate the person at multiple companies in
> order to see the case from both the account and contact perspective.
> How are other people handling this?
>
>