About Unified Messaging

The Unified Messaging framework is the mechanism used by Siebel Business Applications to display messages to users. The foundation of the Unified Messaging framework is the Unified Messaging Service (UMS) business service. For Siebel order management uses, UMS messages recommend products and promotions, explain eligibility, provide price waterfalls, and display results of checks on promotion commitments and integrity. For example, a message prompts a customer service representative (CSR) to cross-sell batteries and a camera case when a customer is purchasing a camera. Messages come to the user in the form of a pop-up applet or rows in a list applet in a view.

The Unified Messaging framework supports the display of dynamic, actionable messages. The framework is an entity independent of the source and type of messages displayed. The Unified Messaging framework natively supports advanced features such as translation of message text, substitution of textual values into the message template, logging of message responses, and suppression of duplicate messages when appropriate (such as advice to a CSR against trying the same upsell if the customer has already rejected it).

In Siebel order management, a message is guidance, a recommendation, or an explanation presented to an end user in response to a button click or an action the end user takes. For example, the Order Catalog view might display the following message when an end user orders an item that is temporarily unavailable:

The product you have selected is on back order until [date]. 

A message’s text is constructed from a fixed message template as well as substitutable text fragments, such as the name of a product.

Messages displayed are sorted by score. The message-generation algorithm sets the score. For the simple preconfigured rules-based messages, the user enters the score in an administration view. Make sure that your messages use a consistent scoring scheme so that the most important messages of any type appear at the start of the list. The default message-generation algorithms can be extended to call out to a propensity-based scoring algorithm to dynamically score the messages that are displayed based on self-learned rules.