If you sell to businesses, the person writing to you is rarely the whole story. Companies are how Gruvi connects five people at the same organisation into one account.

The difference

A customer: One person. One name, their addresses, their threads, their history.
A company: An organisation that customers belong to. It rolls up every person, thread and rating underneath it.

Every customer exists whether or not they belong to a company. Companies are an optional layer on top.

Why companies are worth setting up

Three things become possible that are awkward otherwise.

You see the whole account. Four people from the same business raising the same complaint reads very differently from four unrelated complaints.
Context survives a change of contact. When somebody leaves and a colleague takes over, the history stays attached to the company.
Policies can be scoped to them. A response-time policy can target a company, which is how different accounts end up on different promises.

If you sell to individuals rather than businesses, none of this applies and you can ignore companies entirely.

How to create a company

1Open Customers and click the Companies tab.
2Click Add company.
3Give it a name.
4Claim its email domain.

It takes about a minute, and the domain is the part that does the work.

Claiming a domain

A company's identities are the domains that belong to it. Claim acme.com for Acme, and any new customer writing from an address at that domain is linked to Acme the moment they write in.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is why setting up a company is worth doing early rather than after twenty people have written in.

Do not claim a public domain such as gmail.com. You would sweep every unrelated personal address into one company, and unpicking that is tedious.

A company with no identity yet says so, and prompts you to add a domain. Until you do, people have to be added by hand.

What a company profile shows

The header: Name, when it was added, how many customers, location, how many threads are open, and its labels.
Identities: The domains claimed by this company.
Customers: Everyone linked to it, with their thread counts.
Recent threads: Conversations from across the whole account, each showing which person raised it.
Properties: Your own account-level fields.
Activity: Internal notes for your team, marked as not visible to the customer.

The Activity box on a company is the right place for things that are true of the account rather than one conversation. That might be who the decision-maker is, that they are up for renewal, or that a previous issue is still sore.

Adding somebody by hand

Two routes, depending on where you are.

From the company, click Add customer and pick the person.
From the customer, use Add to company in their Company section.

Use these for people whose address does not match the domain, such as a contractor on a personal address, or somebody at a subsidiary.

When not to bother

Companies add a layer, and a layer nobody maintains is worse than none.

You sell to individuals. Skip it.
Your customers are one-person businesses. The company profile would duplicate the customer profile.
You have no way to know who belongs where. Without a domain to claim, every link is manual, and manual links rot.

Customer vs. company profiles