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OneDesk is equipped to handle a company that supports external customers. There are a couple of settings you can change to make OneDesk work optimally for this use case. 

We recommend the following steps after going through the Quick Setup Wizard within the app. 

External setup step 1: Organization and views

1.1 Project default view

As an organization working on items for external customers, use the “By Customer” view as your default way of looking at projects.

Within the projects application, hover over “Views” on the left-hand side and selecting the cog wheel. Set the “By Customer” view to the default. This view is preferable for understanding which projects are for which customer.  You will set the customer on a project upon creation, see below. 

1.2 Project setup

If you are working on a project for a particular client, you should add the customer organization when you create the project.  

OneDesk can automatically create projects to contain the tickets for a customer organization (more on this later). An example of projects in the “By Customer” view is shown below:

In terms of organization, consider making portfolios for the different companies you are working for. Place projects in the appropriate portfolio upon creation.  You can also create folders inside these projects to further organize your work. 

See: Structuring / Organizing Work

External setup step 2: Automations and routing  

There are some automations you will want when serving external customers. Access your automations by going to More Applications > Administration > Automation Center.

The first automation you will want to create is one that places incoming tickets into a dedicated project for the customer organization. This automation will create a customer project automatically for any new items submitted by customers, if a designated project does not already exist.

This automation should already exist in your account. It is called 'Creating any item types -> Move to customer project'. If you do not see it, create the automation by following the image below.

OneDesk maintains a list of other useful automations, which you can access here.

2.1 (Alternative option) Routing for external customer organizations

Alternatively to the above automation, you can route tickets of specific customer organizations at the organization level. Do this under More applications > Customers -> [the customer organization you want to set up routing rules for].

Here you can choose what happens to items submitted by this organization. Selecting “Add Routing Section” will prompt you to fill out the action of a pre-filled automation. 

For example, you can automatically assign a team or user to any tickets created by a customer organization. This is useful if you have entire teams or users dedicated to certain clients.

External setup step 3: Customer Apps

When serving external customers, a large amount of your communication will be handled through OneDesk’s customer applications.

Organizations serving external customers will embed the customer apps widget onto the homepage of their website. This is the recommended way of exposing these apps to your customers, since it allows you to add or remove customer-facing apps directly from within OneDesk Admin. 

However, links to individual customer application pages can also be placed in the support section of your website, or embedded as iFrames.

More information on:

• Customer Apps
• Adding the Customer Apps to Your Website

Now your organization which serves external customers is set up for success inside OneDesk.