External requesters, and a permission model that expects them.
Customer Service Management applies service management practice to external customers rather than internal employees, with a portal and a support model built for people outside the organization. Our work is external requester models, portal design, and the identity work that external access requires.
Customer Service Management extends service management to people outside your organization. That changes the identity question, because the requester is no longer in your directory.
What it is
Customer Service Management applies service management practice to external customers rather than internal employees, with a portal and a support model built for people outside the organization.
It is for organizations already running internal service management well who are being asked to do the same for customers, usually by a team that has been managing it in a shared mailbox.
What it does
A portal for people outside the directory
External requesters get an account model of their own, which is a deliberate design rather than a group exception.
Service practice applied externally
The same queues, SLAs, and knowledge structure, with a different audience and different expectations.
Where it fits
L3, governance and change, with an unusual demand on L1. Every other product assumes the person is in your directory. This one does not, which makes the external identity model a design decision rather than an inherited default.
What we do with it
Implementation and portal design
Request types, forms, queues, SLAs, and knowledge structured for an audience that will not read instructions.
External identity model
How customers authenticate, what they can see of each other, and how access ends when a contract does.
Running it
Tiered support for a queue whose response times are contractual rather than internal.
Where it earns its place
A support function living in a shared mailbox
The move is not the hard part. Deciding what a customer may see about their own account is.
An organization with contractual response times
Where SLAs are written into agreements, the reporting matters as much as the queue.
Questions we get
Can this share configuration with our internal desk?
How do external users authenticate?
Licensing
External requesters are not licensed like agents, so the count that matters is who works the queue rather than who submits to it. That reconciliation sits with the rest of the estate in licensing and renewals.