How to deal with an external partner organisation that works with multiple customer organisations

[jack_verstappen]

We are setting up CSM to be the portal for a number of custom organisations. In some of these organisation there is a partner organisation involved, who can raise requests for those organisations. For every request it needs to be clear which customer organisation it concerns, and what entitled product.

What are possible setups for dealing with this?

[Dan Breyen]

Hi Jack, I have a similar situation.  I'm assuming your partner org has the same staff reporting for the requests for the different customers.  I have them make sure to notify us who the customer organization it.  The partner staff are setup as customers for multiple organizations, and then I manually assign the organization to the request.

I was thinking about possibly making multiple Organizations "Partner-Customer", but that doesn't necessarily work when the partner staff can enter requests for multiple customers.

It took a little while, the organization will say the partner until I find out who the customer is, and then I will add or change the customer organization on the request appropriately.

Hope that makes sense.

[Davit Mkrtchyan - Be On Time]

Hi @jack_verstappen!

We're from the Be on Time team, and we've dealt with similar architectural challenges in Atlassian.

The struggle with partner organizations working across multiple customers is actually a fundamental issue. The biggest risk here isn't just the technical setup in CSM, but the cross-customer conflicts within the partner's team. When the same staff members are juggling requests from different clients, it's almost impossible to have a reliable capacity plan without a dedicated resource management layer.

Also, from a business perspective, you'll likely find that billing and cost attribution need to be strictly separated to avoid leaks and disputes.

If you're looking for a way to manage this more transparently, I suggest looking into a professional Resource Management approach. We've built tools specifically to handle this kind of complexity—making sure you know exactly who is working on what and for whom, without the guesswork.

We'd be happy to provide some free advice or a quick online consultation to help you map out a more sustainable workflow for your partner ecosystem. Feel free to reach out offline or drop a message here! 🚀