Service Owners
A Service Owner is an organisation entity within the CRM.COM Business Network hierarchy. It owns the service whereby Businesses can register through a self-sign manner.
ESSENTIALS
Firstly, let’s examine some basic terms used in CRM.COM regarding the Service Owner.
Organisation
In CRM.COM, an organisation can be of type Service Owner, Business, Merchant/Service Provider, or Venue/Service Point. This manual specifically focuses on the capabilities of the Service Owner. For more information about the other organisations, please refer to the Business Network manual.
Contact Registry
The Service Owner has the capacity to own a contact registry. This holds the personal details of Contacts registered in CRM.COM. The contact registry can be enabled and maintained at the Service Owner or Business level. Refer to the Contacts manual for further details about the Contact Registry.
Partners
The Service Owner’s partners (associates) can be defined in CRM.COM and linked to specific Businesses. Partners are included solely to recognise their collaboration with the Service Owner in securing a business proposition. Their only purpose in the platform is to have their logo displayed at the bottom of the sidebar menu in the back-end, and in the Contact app (if a business owns one).
Masquerading
Allows a user signed in as a Service Owner to temporarily act as a user of a child organisation based on the Business Network hierarchical structure. For example, a user logged in as a Service Owner can masquerade as one of the Businesses and then as a Merchant/Service Provider of that Business.
Service Owner Operations
The Cloud Operator creates the Service Owner in CRM.COM. You will receive an email invitation to sign in as the Service Owner.
Since the Service Owner owns the service, the Cloud Operator will create a landing page and share the URL with you so that businesses can sign up and use your services. Alternatively, the Service Owner user can manually create Businesses and invite the owners by email.
Complete Your Service Owner Details
When you are signed in to CRM.COM, click on your signed-in name in the top right-hand corner of the screen and select My Business.
Complete your phone, email and address information and finally, upload your logo. Make sure that you select Save before leaving this screen.
Create a Business
A Business can self-sign up to a Service Owner, or a Service Owner user can create the business through the back-end and invite the Business user using an email address.
To manually create a business - select Business Network > Businesses. The Businesses summary screen is displayed, and you can manually create a new business from here by selecting Create Business.
Business Configuration
Set the Business details, note that the Business user can also access and complete this screen once they have been invited to the business.
Name - The name of the business
Country of Agreement - Select the country that the business operates in.
Phone - The business’s phone number.
Email - The business’s contact email address.
Address - If Google Places is configured, search and select the Business address and Google Place id.
Contact Registry - If the Service Owner supports a Contact registry, then the Business will have the option of using it too, if disabled, then the Business maintains its own Contact Registry.
Create a business owner user - When creating a new Business via the back-end, it’s also possible to create and invite an Owner user on-the-fly. Simply enable the respective toggle, and invite the User by completing their personal information in the area below. This action can also be performed by masquerading to the business and navigating to Settings > Security > User Roles & Users > Users > Invite User.
When creating a new Business via the back-end, you can specify the operating country through Settings > Platform > Generic > Countries. Selecting a country (of agreement) automatically sets the currency for that country. A Business Owner user can modify both the country of agreement and currency.
When the business has been created, you can edit it to add the partners. But first, they must be configured in the Settings.
Masquerading
To masquerade as a Business, navigate to the Business Network > Businesses option from the sidebar menu, select the masquerade icon from the Business, and then from there, you can masquerade as a Merchant or service Provider if you need to.
To switch back to the Organisation from where you masqueraded - select your name (top right-hand corner of the screen) > Switch to ….
Copy a Business
The Copy business action copies an entire Business organisation, including configurations, to a new Business organisation name, with the exception of the following data, which is not copied:
Transactional data (e.g. customer events and financial transactions)
Creatives (images)
Insights
Promotions
Pass plans
Applications
Custom forms
Filters
API keys
Service Owner partners
Users
Delete a Business
Deleting a Business will permanently remove the organisation and all associated data, both test and live. This includes contacts, transaction acquiring points, applications, products, orders, rewards, and more. All child organisations (such as Merchants/Venues or Service Providers/Service Points) and their data will also be deleted.
Business users can also Suspend or Deactivate a Merchant or Service Provider, while Merchants and Service Providers can only Deactivate a Venue or Service Point. These actions have the same effect as described above.
Integrations
It’s recommended that a Service Owner configures as many integrations as possible. In some cases, Businesses can use the following integrations from their Service Owner if they are not configured at the Business level.
Address Registry
Google Places
Communications
SMTP
SMPP
Twilio
WhatsApp
Firebase
Communication integrations will be used ONLY for the following operational messages.
Contact
Register Contact
Forgot Password
Request OTP
Refer a Friend
Only SMTP (email)
Back-end User
Invite (Create) User
Resend Email Verification
Forgot Password
2FA Communications
Reports
Insight Exports
Business Network Settings
A Service Owner user can configure the following Business Network-related settings:
Billing Business
This setting is only relevant for Service Owners selling SaaS subscriptions to Businesses. Set the Business responsible for billing the subscription plans and select the default plan for new businesses signing-up. If this setting is not configured, then new businesses signing-up to the Service Owner won’t be billed.
To configure, navigate to Settings > Business Network > Billing & Subscriptions > Billing Business.
Partners
To configure partners and upload their logos, navigate to Settings > Platform > Partnerships > Partners.
To add a partner to a Business, navigate to Business Network > Businesses > locate and Edit the Business in question > click in Partners and select one or more partners from the drop-down list.
As a result, the partner’s logo will appear at the bottom of the sidebar menu when a user of the Business or child organisation of the Business is logged in to the back-end.
Also, on the Contact App, if the Business has one (profile image > Formalities > About the App).
Reference Material
You may also find it helpful to refer to the following manuals for further reading.