In Unified Service Desk context when we say configurations first thing coming into our mind is configuring an agent desktop. But in this article we are going to talk about an entity in CRM for USD called Configuration. This concept is very important in a production environment which resembles very much to the solution concept in CRM.
I would define configuration as a group of USD components in CRM which together defines an agent desktop. Users are added to a configuration as individuals. Let’s assume, if I am added to a configuration called “Manager’s Configuration” in USD, only components like Hosted Controls, Agent Scripts, Action Calls and so on which are part of that configuration will be available for me. That means only they are downloaded to my local machine when we are launching USD system. This will help us to customize the agent desktop based on user role and requirement. Unfortunate part is that as per current design one user can only have one configuration assigned to his/her name. This will create lot of problems in real world.
Let’s assume a scenario in CRM where we have three different roles like an agent, lead and a manager where the responsibilities are overlapping for each role.
- Agent is having a set of responsibilities.
- Lead will be having some extra responsibilities like handling escalation calls along with the same responsibilities of an agent.
- Manager will be having some extra responsibilities like managing premium customers along with the responsibilities of a lead.
Ideal situation would be to have three configurations of different nature and assign users in a proper way to get the agent desktop in proper manner as follows,
- One configuration to handle all agent’s tasks.
- One configuration to handle escalation calls.
- One configuration to handle premium customers.
Once all these configurations are ready we could have assigned these to the respective users in the manner how they have to work on a daily basis. But right now as per the current design its the other way round. Configurations needs to be created for a particular role and we cannot combine different configurations together to achieve desktop for a particular role. This has resulted to create three configurations in below manner which is very rigid and tightly coupled with each role and cannot be reused.
- One configuration to have the desktop for an agent.
- One configuration to have the desktop for an agent and to handle escalation calls.
- One configuration to have the desktop for an agent, handle escalation calls and to handle premium customers.
Down part in this approach is that non of these configuration can be reused which increases the development time slightly, managing them will become little complex.
Good thing here is that the components can be reused in multiple configurations.
Hope you have a very good picture on how to use configurations for Unified Service Desk.
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