/
Business Network

Business Network

In CRM.COM, you can create your internal channel structure of Merchants, Venues and Service Providers with Service Points. Moreover, you can cooperate with peer businesses by aggregating products and services and sharing promotions and offers.


BUSINESS NETWORK ESSENTIALS

Before looking at how the Business Network is created and managed, it’s essential to understand some basic terms used throughout CRM.COM regarding the Business Network.

Topology

As a Business owner, your internal Business Network consists of either Merchants with their Venues or Service Providers with their Service Points (based on system settings).

image-20240925-125842.png

A B2B Network is formed when your business invites other companies to join the CRM.COM platform as your B2B Merchants or when you join other businesses as their B2B Merchant. This helps you build your marketplace, affiliate commerce partnerships, and Commerce Pools.

Your B2B Merchants (distinct from your own Merchants), are the Businesses you have invited to join your B2B network. Likewise, your B2B Peers are other Businesses that have invited your Business to be part of their B2B network. Find out more about these terms below.

Organisation

An organisation is an entity that has different types, such as Service Owner, Business, Merchant/Service Provider, and Venue/Service Point. System users can be invited to join an organisation at any level, except for the Venue/Service Point level, which does not support user accounts. Find out more about each organisation’s key operations here.

  • Business - A business is the main entity that typically manages and owns the products and services sold to contacts.

  • Merchant/Service Provider - Merchants/Service Providers are franchises or partners in reward schemes (digital promotions) who extend the operations of a Business.

  • Venue/Service Point - Venues/Service Points are the Business’s or a Merchant’s physical locations (shops) that can sell products and fulfil orders. Venues/Service Points can optionally be grouped under Organisation Groups. Users can’t be defined at the Venue/Service Point level.

Within the Rewards context, the terms Merchant and Venue is widely used, while in the Subscriptions & Billing context, the term Service Provider and Service Point is used.

B2B Merchant

When your Business invites another business to join your B2B network, and they accept, they become your B2B Merchant. B2B Merchants are managed similarly to your own internal Merchants (if any).

B2B Peer

The B2B Peer is the Business that has invited your Business to join its B2B Network. Once you have accepted, the Business is your B2B Peer, and you are their B2B Merchant.

The B2B Peer owns the contacts and engages in B2B cooperations with other businesses to offer its contacts joint promotions and/or an aggregated product catalogue.

Masquerading

Allows a user of an Organisation to temporarily act as a user of a child organisation based on the Business Network hierarchical structure, e.g. a user logged in as a Business user can masquerade as one of the Merchants/Service Providers of the Business.

Organisation State

The state of an organisation indicates its current operational condition, which also determines the permitted actions that the organisation can perform. The organisation state applies only to Businesses, Merchants/Service Providers and Venues/Service Points and can be one of the following:

  • Active - No restrictions apply.

  • Suspend - Certain restrictions apply, but users can log in.

  • Inactive - No actions can be carried out by the Organisation, and users can't log in.

See here for a more detailed explanation of each state’s restrictions.

Organisation Groups

Organisation Groups are defined at the Business level and are used to group organisations of type Merchant/Service Provider, Venue/Service Point based on common business characteristics. Refer to Settings to find out how to configure and use Organisation Groups.

B2B Connect

B2B connections are established when a Business invites another Business to become its B2B Merchant or joins another Business as a B2B Merchant. In both scenarios, the Businesses can merge their product offerings (Marketplace) and/or promotions (Affiliate Commerce).

B2B Marketplace

Marketplace is a concept whereby a Business expands its product and service offerings by incorporating products from other Businesses into its own product catalogue.

A marketplace is formed when one business invites another to join its network as a B2B Merchant. The B2B Merchant shares selected products with its B2B Peer, thus, allowing the B2B Merchant’s products to be included in the B2B Peer’s product catalogue.

The B2B Peer accepts orders for the B2B Merchant’s products, invoices the contact for the order, and the B2B Merchant fulfils the order.

B2B Affiliate Commerce

Your B2B Merchants can create and fund reward offers for your Business’s contacts.

B2B Affiliate Commerce Delegated

Your B2B Merchants can create and fund reward offers for their products when your business sells them to your contacts.

B2B Commerce Pool

The B2B Commerce Pool model enables Businesses to participate in community commerce by making their Commerce Pools accessible for other businesses to ‘join’ and use in their reward offers. It functions like a network of businesses, where one business creates and publishes commerce pools for available product or service capacities, allowing other businesses to award their customers or provide employee benefits. Businesses can also negotiate or auction discounts (contributions) and witness improvements in your top and bottom lines.

Example

A bakery creates a Commerce Pool for products of type ‘bread’ and publishes the Commerce Pool. A florist ‘joins’ this Commerce Pool and creates an offer to award contacts a 5% cashback using the bakery’s Commerce Pool. A contact who purchases from the florist receives a 5% cashback, which can be spent when they purchase products classified as ‘bread’ from the bakery.

Refer to Appendix A for an example and diagram of this type of B2B Commerce Pool scenario.

B2B Spend

A Business allows its contacts to use funds from their Business Pocket (comprising awards earned and redeemed through purchases with that Business, or simply topped-up money) to pay for purchases at other Businesses.

Refer to Appendix A for an example and a B2B Spend scenario diagram.

'Guest' Contacts

In cases where a contact registered to Business A has made a purchase at Business B, then a contact by the name of ‘Guest [Business A Name]’ is created under Business B for the purpose of logging the purchase.

It should be noted that Business B never awards Guest contacts.

B2B Settlement

This is the process whereby Business and Merchant accounts are debited or credited based on their agreement to fund and contribute towards promotions and purchases. The settlement process can be configured to run at a set time interval from the Business Network settings.

TAPs

Transaction Acquiring Points can be defined at the level of the Business, Merchant/Service Provider and Venue/Service Point and are typically used for uniquely identifying a device (e.g. POS terminal) where purchase transactions can be captured or for additional miscellaneous transaction actions, such as sending a receipt to a third-party platform to be printed. When a purchase event is posted to CRM.COM, the unique TAP code is also provided to trace a purchase and identify the Organisation from where it originated.

Contact Registry

A Contact Registry holds the personal details of Contacts registered in CRM.COM. The contact registry can be enabled and maintained either at the Service Owner or Business level. If a Business maintains its own contact registry, then the contacts that sign up for the Business belong to the Business, and their details are not shared with any other organisations in the network.

Refer to the Contacts manual for further details about the Contact Registry.


Getting Started with the Business Network

This chapter outlines the key settings for creating and managing organisations in CRM.COM. Keep in mind that user permissions vary depending on:

  • The organisation level (e.g., Service Owner, Business, or Merchant) to which the user is logged in.

  • Their user role permissions.

  • Whether they have masqueraded to another organisation. See here for user permissions when masquerading.

Organisations Core Behaviour

The table below defines the core behaviour of each Organisation type.

Organisation Type

Basic Operations

Creates / Manages / Serves

Can Masquerade as a …

Business

  • Registers with a service owner

  • Can use the service owner’s Contact Registry or maintain its own

  • Has a CRM.COM Wallet

  • Have a settlement account (for JCC Merchant services)

  • Can define and manage their own Reward Offers, Products (physical and services), Inventory, Communication Plans, Organisation Groups etc.

  • Can create Activities, Service Requests, Orders

  • Merchants / Service Providers

  • Venues / Service Points

  • Merchant / Service Provider

  • B2B Merchant

  • B2B Peer

Merchant / Service Provider

  • Has one or more Accounts (in multiple currencies) and payment methods.

  • Defines their own Reward Offers, Communication Plans, Organisation Groups and Products

  • Have a settlement account (for JCC Merchant services)

  • Can place Orders and purchase products of the business

  • Can subscribe to the Business’s services

  • Create Activities and Orders

  • Venues / Service Points

N/A

Venue / Service Point

N/A

N/A

N/A

Creating & Managing the Business Network

You must be a registered user to view or create any type of Organisation. You can become a Business user, either by being invited to the Business by another business user, or by registering a Business on CRM.COM. It’s a good idea to read the Security manual to understand how to define user roles and invite users to your Organisation.

To view or create an organisation, use the sidebar menu. The sidebar menu options differ according to how you have logged into the system (e.g. as a Business user or Merchant/Service Provider user) or what type of Organisation you have masqueraded as.

If you are signed in as a Business user, select Business Network - the organisation labels visible under this option depend on how your Business Network Model has been configured. You will see either My Merchants & My Venues or My Service Providers & My Service Points.

Business Network with My Merchants & My Venues

 If you are signed in/masqueraded as a Merchant/Service Provider user - the only available option is My Venues/My Service Points to view or manually create Venues/Service Points.

When creating an organisation, the editable information varies depending on the type of Organisation being created. Contact information and images are typically available for all organisation types, but there are also details and settings relevant only to specific organisations. These are covered below as they play an important role in the operation of the organisations.


Business Configuration

A Business can self-sign up to a Service Owner, or a Service Owner user can create the business through the back-end. Either way, the business user can edit their business details after signing-in by clicking on their name in the top right-hand corner of the screen and selecting My Business.

Attention should be paid to the following settings:

  • Name - The name of the business.

  • Logo - Upload your business logo. This will be used to identify your business within the network and can also be used when communicating with your contacts.

  • Description - Optionally provide an internal description of the business.

  • Phone - The business’s phone number.

  • Email - The business’s email address.

  • Address - If Google Places is configured, search for and select the Business address and Google Place ID.

  • Opening Hours - Optionally specify the Business’s operating hours for ordering delivery and pick-up. Delivery and pick-up can also be closed using the toggles Is delivery closed? and Is pick-up closed? If your Merchants/Venues will manage your orders, then you don’t need to set the opening times here on the Business, you can set them on the Merchants/Venues instead.

  • Commercial Terms

    • Apply award settlement on spend? - The Business can define whether B2B settlements (business charges and rebates) are applied for Merchants when a Contact is awarded or when a Contact spends.