# Customer Management

Here you can find an overview of the Emporix Customer Management Service, along with its features and benefits.

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* Looking for APIs documentation? Check out the [Customer Management](https://app.gitbook.com/s/d4POTWomuSS7d3dnh4Dg/api-guides/companies-and-customers/client-management/customer-management) and [Approval Service](https://app.gitbook.com/s/d4POTWomuSS7d3dnh4Dg/api-guides/companies-and-customers/approval-service/approval).
* To check how the Customer Management and Approval Process can be configured in Management Dashboard, check out the [Customer Management](https://developer.emporix.io/ce/management-dashboard/customer-management) guides.
  {% endhint %}

### Purpose

The Emporix API Customer Management Service is designed to make customer management easier for B2B Commerce and improve approval processes for better business coordination.

The Customer Management Service divides company information into entities that are reusable and manageable. These entities include the companies' subsidiaries, locations, customers, and contacts, as shown in the diagram:

<figure><img src="https://3057647601-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FbTY7EwZtYYQYC6GOcdTj%2Fuploads%2Fgit-blob-e24032845fc5c7a92a28b6516183bafc27e66c8e%2Fcompanies_customers.svg?alt=media" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

By using customer management and user groups with specified permissions, it's possible to set up a convenient approval flow within a company.

### Features

The Emporix API Customer Management Service introduces a set of features that make managing your business customers in your commerce channels easier:

| Feature                                   | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| ----------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Automatically-created customer groups** | Offer personalized pricing to your business customers' employees by adding them to automatically created company customer groups.                                                                                                                                                              |
| **Contact assignments**                   | Allow your employees to assign your business customer employees as contacts representing legal entities they work for. Since contacts may perform different roles within those entities, it is possible to specify the type of contact assignment, for example primary, logistics, or billing. |
| **Comprehensive data model**              | Store detailed data about companies, such as legal information, physical locations, or contacts.                                                                                                                                                                                               |
| **Customer and contact assignments**      | Manage data about customers and contact persons for specific companies.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        |
| **Company relationship structures**       | Store information about subsidiaries of your business customers.                                                                                                                                                                                                                               |
| **Purchasing limits**                     | Specify the maximum purchase limits at the company level.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| **Approval groups**                       | Create groups of business customers' employees who can approve purchases made by other buyers in their company. For the approval process you can use the admin, buyer or requester roles. As a customer you can also create new users and assign them with specific roles.                     |
| **Approval validity**                     | Set expiry dates for the approval requests.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    |
| **Approval transparency**                 | Relevant statuses are set automatically and reflect the state of the approval requests.                                                                                                                                                                                                        |

{% hint style="warning" %}
The Customer Management Service is primarily designed to bring information about your business customers\
close to where it is needed to manage your commerce channels. If your single source of truth about the customers is stored within a third-party-solution it can be integrated into our application.
{% endhint %}