In general, all user management is carried out via the Horizon Portal (API). A company purchases subscriptions (as licences) for its users (staff). User account details are then set up, which are then provisioned over the API to Contact. Each user that is provisioned to Contact has access to specific role types in Contact. The role types that can be accessed for a user depend on the licence(s) held for that user.
Several different role types are available for use in Contact. An Administrator role type is provided free-of-charge. Other role types, such as Base Agent, Supervisor, Voice, Email and Chat, can be purchased by a company as subscriptions.
As well as being given the role types in Contact, users are also assigned the default roles that match the given role types. A company administrator can later remove the default roles from a user account in the Contact web interface, and assign customised versions instead (see Modifying a user account). These customised versions can either be added from scratch or copied from an existing role, for example, a default role could be used as the basis to create new roles. Each new role can have different privileges associated with it that determine what a user who is assigned that role can do.
However, if your organisation requires several different roles, with different role types requiring the same privileges, configuration can give rise to unnecessary duplication of work.
For example, a company may hold licences for both the Base Agent role type and the Supervisor role type. A company administrator may want to create new roles based on these role types to include reports privileges. So they want to create a Base Agent + reports privileges role and a Supervisor + reports privileges role.
Rather than copying the Base Agent role and then adding reports privileges to it thereby creating a Base Agent with reports role and then also copying the Supervisor role and then adding the same reports privileges to it thereby creating a Supervisor with reports role, it would be better practice to leave the Base Agent role and the Supervisor role as they are and instead create a separate Reports role with reports privileges only. This new Reports role could then be “bolted on” to a Base Agent role, a Supervisor role, or indeed any other roles as required and thereby be given to agents and/or supervisors of different types as well.
Similarly, new roles should be created for specific “(groups of) privileges”, such as a Wallboards role, and then bolted on as needed. So you could have: Base Agent role + Reports role + Wallboard role.
Adding extra privileges as bolt-on roles to existing roles and re-using them in this way reduces the (potentially vast) number of roles in existence for your company, avoids unnecessary duplication, and it makes it easier to support in the future, as there is less chance of administrators getting confused because of overlapping roles.
To remove a privilege from a role, you should copy the default role type, remove the privilege, and then replace the default role with the new one. For example, to remove the Handle Outbound Calls privilege from the default Voice role type, you should copy the Voice role type, untick the Handle Outbound Calls checkbox to disable outbound dialling for the role type, and then replace the default Voice role with the new Voice role in the appropriate user’s assigned roles.