Selling through resellers: who owns the customer thread?

Once a product sells through resellers, support splits in a way nobody designed: the reseller answers the customer, the vendor answers the reseller, and the end customer's history exists in two places or neither.

The three questions that decide it

  1. Who is the customer of record? If the reseller owns the relationship, the vendor's desk should treat the reseller as the contact — and say so in the handover rules.
  2. What does the vendor see? Enough context to solve the problem, without taking over the relationship.
  3. What happens when the reseller changes? Conversations should belong to the workspace, not to the individual account that handled them.

Why one shared queue helps here too

If reseller email, end-customer chat and internal escalation all land in the same queue with tags, the split of responsibility is visible instead of implied. The tag says whether an answer goes to the reseller or to the customer — a rule that is easy to follow and easy to audit.

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