Migrating Calls to Interaction & Call Type

[Ray Ennis]

Knowing that Calls (aka "Service Desk Calls") has been depreciated, I'm planning my migration to Interactions.

Our main KPI for Service Desk Calls is the "Call Type", allowing us to track what is the reason for the someone contacting the IT Service Desk.  (What reason are thou? beast, fowl or fish, question, incident, request, wrong number?)

Interactions is missing this field.

I am thinking the answer will be to extend the Interaction table to include the familiar "Call Type", but wanted to confirm I'm on the right track or was their something I'm missing?

I'm not a fan of Interactions as it appears to expect a level of complexity for very little reason, perhaps this is due to the vaguely mentioned 'Queuing' function, but it is not apparent (to me at least).

Other bits' I'm considering for my migration:

- To retain reporting continuity, I'm intending on migrating all of the Call data to the Interaction Table..
- Calls.Contact_Type has been replaced by Interactions.Type (yet OOTB only gives' Chat as a Choice) - what gives?
- Adding additional Choices to Interaction.Type (Phone, Walk Up, Email, Self Service), remove Chat (since we don't use it)
- Implementing "Agent Workspace" at the same time as the migration from Calls to Interaction (still trying to get Agent Assist to work properly with Interactions as OOTB it does not).

I am looking forward to the functionality Agent Workspace, and particularly Agent Assist, provides but this process is becoming a PITA.

[Joaquin Campos]

Hi Ray,

We're also in the process or migration from calls to interactions and we've adapted the values under interaction type to indicate the origin of the interaction (we've also removed chat as we don't use it). 

To use it in agent workspace you just need to make sure that the specific fields you want to see are included in the workspace view:

We also thought that the transition was going to be smoother, but definitely calls and interactions are different things!

Hope it helps!

Joaquín

[Ray Ennis]

Thank you for the reply Joaquin!

You confirmed, and looks like you've gone the same route as I'm intending on doing regarding the Contact_Type (the new 'Type').
I just confirmed, through a genius meeting, that this is the expected method to use and those options apparently are installed when Language Packs are installed, yet are not included with the base OOTB portion.

[JODY8]

Adding a custom field to the Interaction table for call type is a reasonable solution. 

[Ray Ennis]

I seized the opportunity to have a quick meetup at the Genius Bar.

I was able to confirm some of my intended actions and was redirected on others.
My takeaways:

- Updating the choices in Interactions.Type is expected.
- Extending the Interaction Table to include the "Call Type", to retain the same functionality that Calls.Call_Type provided, is a viable method (and as Jody confirmed above, a reasonable solution).  However due to the possible of this functionality being added later, follow procedures when adding an user-added variable (i.e. include the 'u_' to my user field).
- Migrating data from the Call Table to the Interaction Table is ok.
- Avoid the extra work to manually duplicate Agent Workspaces, instead use ACL and Scoped permissions to provide functionality depending on who is using the Workspace (IT verses HR).  Also I should keep in mind that this restrictive functionality should already built in when the appropriate Plug-In's are installed.

Thank you to SN's Digital Experience to providing the opportunity to have one-on-one sessions.