Groups, contacts and organizations

Tickets are about people: someone asks for something, someone enters it, someone handles it. Boxture models these people as contacts, bundles them in teams called groups and in companies called organizations. Together they decide who sees which tickets. You manage them under Tickets › Groups, Tickets › Contacts and Tickets › Organizations.

How they fit together

Organization (a company, matched on e-mail domain)
└── Contacts (people; usually one per Boxture user)
       └── each contact can be in one Group (a team)

Ticket
├── Requester, Submitter, Assignee → contacts
├── Group → group
└── Organization → organization

Every contact, group and organization has an owner: the Boxture account it belongs to. You only see contacts, groups and organizations owned by the current account or one of its sub-accounts (see Account switch).

Contacts

A contact is a person who takes part in tickets as requester, submitter, assignee or comment author.

Contacts are created automatically

You normally do not have to create contacts for Boxture users. The first time a user needs a contact (when they open the tickets pages, create a ticket, write a comment or cause a problem), Boxture:

1. looks for a contact already linked to the user;
2. otherwise looks for a contact with the same e-mail address and links it to the user;
3. otherwise creates a new contact with the user's name, e-mail address and time zone, owned by the user's account.

Problems created by integrations or background jobs, where no user is involved, use a system contact.

Creating a contact manually

Create a contact manually for a person who should be assigned tickets but does not have a Boxture user (yet). When a user with the same e-mail address is created later, it is linked to this contact automatically.

1. Go to Tickets › Contacts.
2. Choose New contact from the menu.
3. Fill in the fields (below) and save.

The contact is owned by the current account.

Contact fields

Field	Description
Name	Display name. When empty, the e-mail address is shown
Email	Required. Also used to match the contact to an organization
Twitter, Phone	Optional contact details
Organization	The organization the contact belongs to
Group	The team the contact is in. A contact can be in one group
Suspended	Marks the contact as suspended
Time zone	The contact's time zone

You cannot change the organization or group of your own contact: these fields are not shown when you edit yourself. Use My contact in the contacts menu to open your own contact.

The contacts list

The list shows Name, Email, Phone, Twitter, Time zone, Group, Organization, Owner (the account), Suspended, Created at and Updated at.

Groups

A group is a team, for example Inbound, Customer service or Night shift. Groups make tickets visible to everybody in the team, regardless of who requested them.

Creating a group

1. Go to Tickets › Groups.
2. Choose New group from the menu.
3. Enter the Name and choose the Owner: the account the group belongs to. Only accounts you can switch to are offered.
4. Save.

Then add people to the group by setting the Group field on their contacts.

What a group does

• A ticket can be assigned to a group with the Group field on the ticket.
• Every member of a group sees all tickets assigned to the group, and all tickets in which another member of the group is requester, submitter or assignee.
• The tickets, work orders and problems lists can be filtered on group, so a team can work from its own queue.

Groups across accounts

Users who work in a parent account see the groups of all its sub-accounts. A logistics provider can therefore create groups per client account and still see them all from the parent account.

Organizations

An organization represents a company whose people take part in tickets: typically a client account, or the logistics provider itself. Organizations do three things:

1. Group contacts by e-mail domain. New contacts whose e-mail domain is listed on an organization are added to it automatically.
2. Link problems to clients. A problem is linked to the organization whose owner is the account of the affected order, container or shipment. For picking problems it is the account that owns the location (usually the logistics provider), because one picking problem can affect orders of several clients.
3. Share tickets between the contacts of the organization, when enabled.

Creating an organization

1. Go to Tickets › Organizations.
2. Choose New organization from the menu.
3. Fill in the fields and save.

Field	Description
Shared tickets	When on, every contact of the organization sees the tickets in which any other contact of the organization is involved. Off by default
Shared comments	Allows the contacts of the organization to share each other's comments. On by default
Owner	The Boxture account this organization belongs to. Set it to the client account so that the client's problems are linked to this organization
Name	The company name
Domains	The e-mail domains of the company, separated by commas, for example brand-a.com,brand-a.nl. Each must be a valid domain name
Website	The company's website

Once saved, the Contacts tab lists the contacts that belong to the organization.

Creating an organization from a contact

When a contact does not belong to an organization yet, its page shows a Create Organization button. It:

1. creates an organization named after the contact's e-mail domain, with that domain in Domains, owned by the same account as the contact;
2. adds the contact to it;
3. adds every other contact with the same e-mail domain that has no organization yet.

This is the quickest way to set up organizations for existing users. Review the result afterwards: set the name, owner and sharing options as needed. When an organization with that domain already exists, the button fails; set the contact's Organization field instead.

Automatic matching on e-mail domain

When a new contact is created (automatically for a new user, or manually), Boxture looks for an organization owned by the current account or one of its sub-accounts that lists the contact's e-mail domain, and adds the contact to it. Contacts that already existed before the domain was added are not moved; use Create Organization on a contact or set their organization by hand.

Organizations on tickets

• Problems get their organization automatically and it cannot be changed afterwards.
• On a work order you can choose the organization yourself, and change it later.
• The tickets lists can be filtered on Organization.

Recommended setup

For a logistics provider with several client accounts:

1. Create an organization per client account, with the client account as Owner and the client's e-mail domain(s) in Domains. Leave Shared tickets off unless the client's users should see each other's tickets.
2. Create an organization for your own company, owned by the parent account.
3. Create groups for your own teams (for example Inbound, Outbound, Customer service) and put your staff's contacts in them.
4. Assign problems and work orders to the right group, and filter the lists on group to give each team its own work queue.

See Tickets for the full rules on which tickets each user can see.