What is the difference between People and Customer?

[Mark Anderson]

Hi All

What is the difference with customers being added to the People or the Customer page?

What would happen if i removed people from the People page, would they still have access to the Support Portal?

Cheers!

Mark

[Tarun Sapra]

Hello @Mark Anderson

Both People and Customer are different entities. Customers are users who can report tickets on your service desk where as People are generally users who actually work on those tickets and are internal to your organization. 

Users who are in the "service-desk-team" role in the people's section are actually agents and count towards the agent license.

Please read complete description here

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/setting-up-service-desk-users-732528877.html

[Tarun Sapra]

Regarding your second question, from the docs

Customers are automatically added to the Customers list if your service desk is open to users with Jira accounts or allows customers to create their own accounts. 

[Tarun Sapra]

And here's how you can setup the customer access

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicedeskcloud/set-up-customer-permissions-732528940.html

If it's not a public facing Jira then it's better to select the option 

Anyone with an account on %your_Jira_Cloud_site%

[Rafa]

> When a customer is manually added by an Admin or Agent either in the 'Customer' tab or in the 'People' tab, they will show under the 'Customers' tab and also in the 'People' tab, even if only added in one place, it's mirrored.
If a customer creates their own account through the Help Center or via email, they will only show under the 'Customers' tab, not under the 'People' tab.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/differences-between-the-service-desk-customers-in-the-people-tab-and-in-the-customers-section-1319567856.html

(it is probable that the article above did not exist at the time this question was posted)

[Alexey Matveev]

Hello,

Customers are special users for Jira Service Desk. These users do not need a license. They can access only Jira Service Desk Portal. if you want such a user, then you should add this user to Customers. No need to add this user to People.

[Mark Anderson]

is it possible that users got added to "People" when they email their issues into the support portal?

[Jack Brickey]

People is a superset and has all users associated with project. People allows you to change the role of users. There are instances where a customer could have their role changed; generally this is if the customer is an employee and takes on new roles. 

[Mark Anderson]

Is there any issue if i remove the customers from the "Person" lists? based on my testing i don't think so.  I was still able to view and create tickets on my test account.

[venkateshprasad]

I just tried out a few things and I think I have an answer to this, however this is for DC instance.

see my comments in this link https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Service-Desk-Customer-vs-Portal-Customers/qaq-p/1692381#U2024306