NEIL PARKHURST

When using Microsoft’s Omnichannel for Customer Service or Unified Routing “Role Persona Mapping” can come into play. In this post I will explain how and why.

If I’m completely honest, until recently I hadn’t given persona mapping much thought! And therefore, I admit I hadn’t fully appreciated why I might amend these settings or considered the implication of the persona!

You will find the Persona Mapping option under “User management” in your customer service admin center.

Below you can see the typical / default settings for persona mapping. I guess this slide illustrates why I hadn’t experimented with this feature! As out of the box the admin, supervisor and agent personas are mapped to the roles you’d expect. (e.g. Supervisor to users with the Omnichannel supervisor role.)

Tip: You may be aware that with Omnichannel for Customer service security roles need to be assigned to individual users. (Rather than teams.) For many organizations that doesn’t present a challenge. But I have seen some companies try to simplify role management by adding roles to teams. (As team members can inherit privileges from the team roles.) It seems assigning roles directly to users maps to the Omnichannel persona … meaning you will need to add at least the core Omnichannel roles directly to your users.

What does the persona imply?

Any user with the Omnichannel admin, supervisor and agent roles will inherit permissions to access certain tables (etc), as we’d expect with security roles. But having the related persona seems to also drive other functionality. For example, someone with the Omnichannel supervisor role is going to see the ongoing conversations dashboard when they open the customer service workspace.

Microsoft’s documentation does give full details of each persona. You can read those details here.

Amending Persona Mappings
In many implementations you may have no reason to amend the persona details. However, it will be quite common to clone the out of the box security roles and customize them. If you create a custom role then you’d want to map the personas to your new roles.

Below you can see that clicking on the persona name allows you to tailor which roles would trigger a user to have a particular persona.

It maybe useful to know that within the enhanced user management option you can see which persona or personas are assigned to each agent. (Notice that some of my agents have multiple persona, I will discuss that concept later in this post.)

Assignment Implications
Why do I care if someone has the supervisor and / or agent persona?

It is possible for one user to be both a supervisor and an agent. When I demo Omnichannel, for example, I will commonly ensure I have all the possible personas. But understanding how each effects routing may help you decide if having multiple personas is beneficial.

Let’s consider the agent persona first … when work items need to be assigned any “matching” agent in a particular queue with the persona of agent may be assigned the associate conversation. (Be that a phone call, chat or even an email.)

Someone with “just” the supervisor role can exist in the same queue but conversations would not be assigned to them.

If you want your supervisors to routinely answer calls, then you’d need them to have both the supervisor and agent persona. But it will be a common requirement that the supervisors monitor the queues but they don’t “work” the queues.

Of course, we could just remove the supervisor from the queue. But having them in the queue is useful! One example …. we can enable sentiment alerts, then the supervisors will see alerts regarding negative conversations. (They only see sentiment alerts for the queues they are members of.) To enable this feature, use the “Insights” option and look for “Sentiment analysis”. Below, you can see how we can decide when a supervisor should see a notification.

Another reason you might want a supervisor to be part of a queue is that the agents can then easily consult with and potentially transfer conversations to the supervisor.

For these reasons, I believe it is useful for someone to have just the supervisor persona. Allowing them to effectively manage a queue without being assigned conversations.

Hopefully you can see that by considering which users will be assigned to which persona we can tailor how work is (or isn’t) assigned to them. Enjoy.