Product Linking

If your organization has large numbers of categories or dispositions, staff members and customers must review long lists of menu items to find appropriate options. You can simplify their choices with product linking.

When products are linked to categories, only the linked categories are displayed when customers select products on the customer portal or when staff members select products while working on incidents. When products are linked to dispositions, only the linked dispositions are displayed when agents select products for incidents. Product linking is a powerful tool for enhancing efficiency for both staff members and customers.

Note: When product links have not been defined or product linking has been disabled, all categories and dispositions are available, regardless of the selected product. Product-category linking is independent of product-disposition linking, so you can enable one or the other or both.

Leaf products are those products that do not have any subproducts. Similarly, leaf levels of categories have no subcategories and leaf-level dispositions have no subdispositions. Links can be created only between leaf levels of products and categories and between leaf levels of products and dispositions. However, implicit linking occurs between the parent levels of products, categories, and dispositions that are linked. Parent products implicitly contain the same links that the leaf products below them contain. In other words, a parent product’s links are “inherited” from their leaf products.

Assume, for example, you want to link a leaf-level product called Prepay to categories, and the Prepay product is a subproduct of Call Plans. Also assume that none of the other leaf products under Call Plans have category links.

When you edit the Prepay product and select Category Links, assume you select the General category, which creates two links, one to each of its leaf categories: Information and Help. Also assume you select Account and Billing, which is a leaf category (no subcategories).

When you save your links, return to the Products/Categories/Dispositions editor, and drill down on the Category-Links report, you see the three categories you just linked to the Prepay product. For example,

Account and Billing
General > Help
General > Information

Although you linked the leaf product, Prepay, to the categories, its parent product (Call Plans) was implicitly linked to the same categories. So even though you cannot directly link a parent product to categories, you implicitly link it by linking one or more of its leaf products.