Customer Database "for Service Desk" (or otherwise)

Description

In order for Service Desk to be useful to an EE customer like us, we need to group Issues together under a Customer abstraction. Having an abstraction for a Customer would provide these features:

• Customer info:
  • ID
  • Name
  • Description area (to cover a variety of needs such as listing points of contact, account type, or other use-case specific details)
  • Status (could be covered by labels, perhaps)
• Customer Issues:
  • List of Issues (Open/Closed/All)

Proposal

• Add Organization (Customer) entity and ability to:
  • GraphQL
    • Create
    • Read
    • Update
    • Delete (and/or change state?)
  • UI
    • Create
    • Read
      • Pagination
    • Update
    • Delete (and/or change state?)
• Add Contact entity and ability to:
  • GraphQL
    • Create
    • Read
      • Pagination
    • Update
    • "Parent organization" link in create/update
    • Delete (and/or change state?)
  • UI
    • Create
    • Read
    • Update
    • Delete (and/or change state?)
• Add Contact <-> Issue relationship (table)
  • Expose Contacts against issues
    • GraphQL
    • UI
    • Add system note from Issues::SetCrmContactService
  • Add ability to associate an existing issue with a Contact (thus indirectly associated with an Organization)
    • GraphQL
    • UI
      • Component/widget?
      • Quick action
        • Improve/add autocomplete etc?
  • Add ability to create a new issue with a Contact attached
    • ?
    • UI
• Add ability to list issues associated with a Contact
  • GraphQL
  • UI
  • Add "token" thingy for issue search bar filter?
• Add ability to list issues associated with an Organization
  • GraphQL
  • UI
  • Add "token" thingy for issue search bar filter?
• Rollout feature?
  • Add group setting to toggle CRM on/off
  • Default feature flag to on?
  • Remove feature flag
• Handle nested groups?
• Docs
  • First iteration customer relations (crm) docs
  • Add some missing bits (issue search? add contact, add organization etc)
  • Add some records to GDK seed data???
• Tech debt
  • Rename legacy customer_relations code references to crm - #350629
  • Think more about currency for organization.default_rate #348605
  • https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues?sort=created_date&state=opened&label_name[]=CRM

One benefit is to be able to pull up all of a customer's issues when they call in.

Another benefit is to have people supporting a customer be able to quickly get up to speed on what is troubling a customer.

Overall this enables a company to provide excellent customer service to them by ensuring their needs are met.

Links / references

• AutoTask
• ZenDesk
• Desk