How You Organize Information with Products, Categories, and Dispositions

When you use products and categories to group incidents and answers, your knowledge base is more organized. As a result, staff members and customers can quickly find answers to their questions.

For example, a company that manufactures and sells cellular phones might add products such as Smart Phones, Camera Phones, and Accessories. Categories might include Technical Specifications and Warranty Information.

Products and categories organize data in the same ways, and you can choose to use either or both when you configure Service. If you use both, incidents and answers can be organized into specific classifications, and customers can search for answers using product and category filters. Customers can select specific products and categories to refine community posts and searches. You can create up to six levels each of products and categories and specify the number of levels agents must enter when working with incidents. Although products and categories are powerful options for keeping the knowledge base well organized, you are not required to use them.

An incident’s disposition refers to the way the incident is ultimately solved. You may want to require that agents select a disposition before they save an incident when they change the status to Solved. Dispositions do not appear on the customer portal.

Incident dispositions can provide important information and insight about your organization’s interactions with customers. You can add as many dispositions as you need, and you can also add sub-levels of dispositions to a total of six levels. For example, you might have a top-level disposition of Sent to Regional Billing. With additional levels, you can organize incidents into specific sub-dispositions such as East Coast, Midwest, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Northwest. Service lets you define the number of disposition levels agents must select before marking an incident solved.

Perform these tasks to configure product, categories, and dispositions.

• Define levels of products, categories, and dispositions on the administration interface—Set the number of product, category, and disposition levels you want to require on the administration interface.
• Define levels of products and categories on the customer portal—Set the number of product and category levels you want to require customers to select on the Ask a Question and community pages.
• Add products, categories, and dispositions—Add the products and categories you want to use for grouping answers and incidents in the knowledge base. The products and categories you add appear to staff members who work with answers and incidents on the content pane. They also appear on the customer portal for customers to use when searching for and subscribing to answers and using the community. Add dispositions so agents can indicate how an incident was ultimately resolved.
• Link products to categories—To restrict category selections to only the categories associated with a selected product, enable and configure product-category linking. Product-category linking affects staff members working with incidents and customers searching on the customer portal.
• Link products to dispositions—To restrict staff member selection of dispositions based on the incident’s product, enable and configure product-disposition linking.