scripted navigation ideas for oracle service cloud

Scripted Navigation: An alternative to tabs

About the Author Mark Kehoe is a former RightNow / Oracle Service Cloud Principal Consultant who joined the company way back in 2006. He has since gone on to create his own consultancy offering student relationship management to Universities throughout Australia. He has been a regular feature at Oracle Service Cloud conferences both in Europe and Australia and now at the Higher Education User Group.

About this Document This document offers an alternative to tabbed navigation within a workspace or an alternative to using workspaces. This document offers no warranty for the use or implementation of agent scripting or workspace design. For the purposes of this document agent scripting will be called ‘scripts’ or ‘scripting’.

A script is typically used for telephone calls where an agent needs to ask some specific questions to gain information from the caller. However, it can be used in a broader context which I’m about to explain to you.

What’s wrong with using tabs? Nothing. Tabs offer a great way of creating compartments of fields. They are quick and work efficiently.

Isn’t this a lot of effort? Yes. Scripts take time to produce and the navigation needs to be carefully tested. A script has some notable limitations; particularly around copying rules from one page to another.

I can create tabbed navigation in minutes; less than if I’m in a hurry and throw down hundreds of fields before the kettle has had chance to boil and by the time I’ve had a cup of tea I’ve created a workspace filled with fields that are confusing and sometimes misleading. Let’s look at the possible alternatives.

Why use scripted navigation? A user may ask ‘why am I seeing this?’, ‘do I need to complete this field?’ or ‘what does this field mean to me?’ and scripting offers a structure that workspaces cannot.

2 Scripted navigation

Created by Mark Kehoe [email protected] 0487 335311

And not all fields have the same meaning, value or significance – so why show them when they’re not important?

• Show fields only when they need to be seen • Created nested layers of information without subtabs within tabs • Give the same field two different meanings • More robust development*

The benefits of scripted navigation Scripted navigation acts a little like the knowledgebase. It can ask the user what they want to do and then give them the information – and only the information – they need to accomplish the activity. It will focus the user on what they need to do next rather than all the things they can do.

*Scripts create separate compartments for development. Think of it as lots of little workspaces joined together without them tripping over each other’s rules unlike workspaces which can have dozens of rules which get hard to know what they do.

Profile-based fields are now easier to implement and understand.

How to create a simple script Here is a navigation script. Below shows a header which can be anything you want and two types of navigation; the standard, linear forwards-backwards (which you can remove if you don’t need it) and the non-linear show-and-tell.

Kehoe Consulting Getting more from scripts

3


As you can see each page has its own navigation and creating the navigation couldn’t be easier. Pop the questions onto the lower navigation pane (I’ve selected radio-buttons for my example) and right-click to select where you want them to go:

Finally select the page you want to navigate to. Tip: Make the name of the page the same as the navigation and joining navigation to pages becomes real easy!

A simple script: Conditionals What if one of my pages should only be accessed by certain profiles?

This is just a simple click away. Click the page button within the ribbon then pick the page you want to hide from certain profiles. I’m going to hide page 1:



Now only my ‘WellBeing’ profile can access page 1.


5


A longer script: Showing Vs. Editing I want my users to be able to see the information but I probably don’t want them changing it. As shown in the example above I can now design profile-based navigation to allow some users to edit data and others to view.

I work in Higher Education so I’m going to use a contact record as an example:

“Show me the contact details”

But who’s? Here’s the many contact relationships (constituents) I have:

• Current student • Future student • International student • Domestic student • Staff

• Researcher • Agent • Schools person • Business person • Alumni

Each of these relationships may have fields that are unique to them or fields that do the same thing but have a different meaning. For example:

• A current student will have a student ID but a future student won’t • International students will need two addresses • A current student ATAR is interesting, a future student is crucial • A current student could also be a member of staff and an alumnus



I start with a home page or summary page. This is information common to all constituents such as name, address, email and mobile. I can’t edit anything for the moment as I don’t have permissions but let’s navigate to the constituent:

Now I can change the name, mobile and constituent flags. I can also add gender and ethnicity as this information will be common across all constituents. Let’s switch on the future student flag and we can now navigate to the future student page:


7


Here I can change the future student information such as their basic education and any barriers to application but not their name or mobile; it’s just future student information. The last button is disability. Let’s see what’s there:

As you can see, I don’t have permission to see if this person has any disabilities. I can contact the WellBeing team (who do have access) if I need to know more.



Advanced scripting: Mixing scripts and tabs together A contact record is a clear example of delineation across the dataset but what if the dataset is a mixture of several objects? Scripting helps users complete a complicated task by showing on the fields we need. Let’s start with my incident workspace:

There’s lots of complicated things the user could do but I want them to be focused on what they need to do. By starting the workspace with a series of questions the user is given fixed activities to do. By blending only the fields needed to accomplish an activity the page remains free of clutter.

First, let’s see how the script tells the workspace what tab to show:

As we have seen each question within the script has a rule:


9


The key part to the rule shown above is the named event. The script is saying ‘Hey, if anyone is listening I’d like you to do this’ and the workspace as a corresponding rule which listens and says ‘Yep, I heard you and I’ll do it’. Here’s the workspace rule:



Now we have seen the script and the workspace let’s look how the interaction works in practice. The script is embedded in the summary tab of the workspace:

The summary tab of the workspace asks the user what they would like to do next. If the user selects ‘Get in touch with faculty’ they are given the next screen:

When I have finished this activity, I can return to the questions shown above or carry out any other activity.


11


Advanced scripting: Fake tabs As a final idea for thinking outside of the tabset here’s a button approach to navigation using a single script.

I have a lot of data in custom objects to encapsulate into separate pages of the script. I have a list of buttons connected to different pages related to a custom object. Each page has its own fields and data requirements. In this example, it’s a catalogue of University degrees but it would work well with any complex custom object relationships where there’s lots of fields across lots of objects.

Here’s are my buttons that jump across different custom objects:

Next is my page navigation. While it’s quite long it’s just a repetitive list of connectors to pages within the script. Notice how the pages all have nice names:

In action the resulting script is clean and effective with a focus on data rather than superfluous page decoration. See how cleanly it moves from one button to the next:


13


Conclusion A script is more than just an aid to telephony; it can break apart complex tasks, create hierarchal data relationships, add profile-based permissions, add navigation if a workspace has lots of complexity and look cleaner than a workspace. While not shown here a script can also orchestrate complex workspaces within a workflow.

I hope this scripting example has been interesting and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to leave a comment, send me an email or give me a call.