Our Customer Portal, the heart of EntirelyDigital's operations and the essential link for our customers to manage their data and services, differentiates between "users" and "contacts" within its system, each serving distinct roles in the management and billing processes. Understanding these differences is crucial for our customers to effectively manage their accounts and to ensuring proper communication flows.
Users
In the Customer Poral, a "user" is an individual with permission to log in and interact with the system. Users are typically the account holders or clients who own the services being billed for. They have full access to manage their account, including viewing services, submitting support tickets, making payments, and configuring settings. Each user account is associated with a unique email address and login credentials, emphasizing the idea that a user represents a distinct individual who can own products and services or be associated with multiple client accounts through the "User Accounts" functionality. This feature allows a single user to access and manage multiple client accounts, each potentially representing different companies or entities, under a single login.
Contacts
Contacts, on the other hand, are sub-accounts linked to the main user account, designed to help manage billing, support, and communications for the services provided to the user. Contacts cannot log in to the Customer Portal independently (unless they are also configured as a sub-user with specific permissions), but they can receive emails about account notices, invoices, support ticket responses, and other communications based on the permissions granted by the main user. A contact might be a billing department email, a technical support contact within a company, or any other individual the main account holder wishes to receive notifications regarding the account. Contacts are essential for ensuring that the right people within an organization or family receive the correct updates and information, without requiring separate user accounts.
Key Differences
- Login Capabilities: Users have full login capabilities with permissions to access and manage the account, whereas contacts typically do not have login access unless specifically granted sub-user access with defined permissions.
- Account Ownership: Users are considered the owners of the account and services, holding the primary relationship with the provider. Contacts are secondary and serve more as points of communication or notification recipients.
- Functional Scope: Users can manage all aspects of the account, including service management, billing, and support. Contacts' roles are primarily for receiving information, with their abilities to interact with the account limited by the permissions set by the user.
Set up multiple users and contacts.
Since we use your email addresses to validate requests, we suggest that you have multiple users and/or contacts using different email addresses and phone numbers to ensure that the loss of access to one email address does not prevent you from having access to support. Users are individuals who can login to the Customer Portal, while contacts are able to send and receive emails from us. Adding users and contacts can be done by following these steps:
- Visit the Customer Portal "User Management" (link) page OR the "Contacts" (link) page
- Follow the steps to manage the users, or contacts
Should you have any further questions, or require any assistance in configuring your users, or contacts, to best suit your needs, please feel free to contact us (link).