Overview

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Customers that are UCSD students, staff, or faculty will have pre-loaded customer data in the system. Sometimes, however, those customers may email from a personal account, such as 'student@gmail.com'; in other cases, the customer may be a vendor or outside contact. In these cases, the agent will need to create a guest contact record.

Background

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When the ServiceNow team enabled Customer Service Management, we created an Account and Contact hierarchy.

• Accounts are a logical structure that can contain 1 or more contacts.
  
  • In most cases an Account is either a Student Account or a Department Account
• Contacts are individuals
  
  • A contact can only belong under one account.

Unfortunately, our data about contacts and accounts isn't perfect. Our data is pulled from financial and student systems and doesn't include all customers. In order to continue to provide a decent customer experience, we allow agents to be able to create guest contacts. These guest contacts will be reviewed periodically in order to help the ServiceNow team pull better data.

Examples of Potential Guest Contacts
Incoming students Alumni Parents Extension students A student that may not be pulled into the financial/student systems correctly

 

When to create a guest contact	When not to create a guest contact
When a contact doesn't exist When an affiliate doesn't exist in the system	If a person contacts you from a different email and is able to provide PII about their ucsd email address In this case, attach the case to the main contact If the guest insists to be contacted at the specific email, the email can be added to the external watch list

How to create a guest contact

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There are 3 ways to create a contact.

Creating a contact from the sidebar navigation

1. 1. Navigate to Case → Customer → Contacts
   2. Select 'New'
   3. Populate the Contact Details
   4. Save the record.

Creating a contact from a case that doesn't have the contact field filled out.

1. 1. Open a case → Click the "+" button next to the customer field
   2. Populate the contact details
   3. Click Submit.
   4. The contact will auto populate on the case contact field

Creating a contact from a case after searching for it.

1. 1. Open a case → Click the "magnifying glass" next to the customer field
   2. Click New (after trying to search for the contact)
   3. Populate the Contact details
   4. Click Submit
   5. The contact will auto populate on the case contact field