There was a time when I had a customer from the entertainment industry, where customers can be an individual person or it can be a company organizing a party for employees.
To manage the Customer Service (Case Management) there was an option to choose either Contact or Account uses the Customer Field. But this was only limited to the few particular entities (Opportunity, Quote, Order and Invoice) and we cannot create a same customer type of field for any custom entity which was a requirement for us and this was a kind of little setback. We had to create two different fields to select customer, one for account and one for contact.
In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Update 1 The field type “Customer” was made available. Customer type field is nothing but a lookup which allow us to connect with two different entity Account and Contact. This was small but a valuable change made by Microsoft.
Note:
You cannot add related record filtering on “Customer” field, like we can do with other lookup on the form.
Lets get started…
You can follow bellow steps or check out my previous post on Basics of Dynamics CRM form customization
- Go to Setting
- Open Customization
- Open Customize the System
- Select an entity
- Expand the Entity Tree
- Select field
- Click on new
- Fill mandatory information
- Select Data type as Customer
When You create a Customer type filed two N:1 relationship gets created for both Account and Contact entity
By default Account is selected for the records when user enter data and search , user need to change it manually to select contact.
however when user searches he data it populate result from both Account and Contact.
Did I missed anything ? or Do you have some thoughts ? Let me know in comments.
D CRM Explorer 
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