Customers

Overview#

Your customers (revs) and their identity are a crucial part of the DevRev offering and ecosystem. Conversations on DevRev rely on rev identity to capture information about the customer initiating the conversation. Similarly, tickets on DevRev can capture who the ticket was reported by (or reported for).

Concepts#

Customer identity in DevRev comes from two basic constructs:

• Rev user: Your end user or customer.
• Rev org: Any logical grouping that a rev user is part of. It could represent a customer account for your B2B product (for example Stripe as a customer of Slack) or a workspace in your software product (such as a Slack workspace).

Identity ingestion#

The identity of your customers can be brought to the DevRev system in multiple ways.

PLuG
Your PLuG integration automatically brings customer identity to DevRev with each widget conversation.
Rev org and rev user information provided as part of the PLuG integration identifies or creates corresponding customer identity in the DevRev system and links it to PLuG conversations.

Integrations
DevRev's integrations like Slack for Support, Support with Email are additional channels available with DevRev's Omnichannel Support offering.

APIs or UI
Apart from automatic ingestion, new customer records can also be created manually using APIs or UI. With DevRev's APIs, you can create automations to ensure your customer records in DevRev stay in sync with your primary customer data.

External reference#

While ingesting customer identity into DevRev, it's important that customer information coming across channels is matched to the same record.
For example, a customer record created by you using APIs should get resolved and matched when the same customer engages with you on the PLuG widget for a support interaction.

This is achieved by using the external reference provided by you when creating customer identity.

External reference for a rev user user_ref
A unique identifier for an end user from your primary customer record. The system uses this to resolve a newly created rev user with rev users already in the system.
If none is available, a good alternative is the email address or phone number that could uniquely identify the user.
If none is specified, a system-generated identifier will be assigned to the user.

External reference for a rev org org_ref
A unique identifier for the customer organization from your primary customer record. If none is available, a good alternative is the customer’s company domain. If none is specified, a system-generated identifier will be assigned to the organization.

For ingestion channels where providing an external reference isn't possible, the system relies on custom logic to identify and match incoming customer identity.

Example: the Slack and Email integration use a combination of the rev user email and rev org domain_name values.

Adding new Customers#

Customer records offer a place to do the following:

• Find all conversations and tickets linked to a customer in one view.
• Have internal discussions related to a customer.
• Add description or notes about a customer.
• Assign an owner or tags to the customer.

Apart from customer records that get automatically created from your PLuG integration, new customer records can be created through the UI.

New customers can be added to the DevRev system directly from the Customers page.

While creating new customer records, be sure to specify the External Ref so customer information coming from other channels (like PLuG) can be matched to the right customer record.