Work Items

You can configure a channel to let agents receive work items, just as they receive interactions in other channels like chat, email, or inbound voice. For example, your organization may receive tickets or issues from Salesforce or another CRM application. These items can be routed directly to agents for handling based on the Studio scripts, ACD skills, and points of contact you define. Agents process and disposition work items in their agent application, just as they would any other interaction.

Bo Peep is a manager in the Operations department at Classics, Inc. Her team, the Shepherds, deals with lost sheep claims from field representatives. She wants claims submitted to her team either by a phone call or through a new app that the field reps use. When submitted by phone call, the answering agent will create the claim while on the call. But for claims submitted through the app, Bo Peep configures a work item point of contact in CXone to route the claims to her team members. Claims submitted by the app will be handled in the order received with the phone calls.

Bo worked with one of the script developers at Classics, and with CXone Professional Services, to configure CXone and create Studio scripts to receive claims through the app. They worked in this order:

  1. Bo created the skill for the work items.
  2. Bo then had her Classics team create an empty Studio script called “Claim Work Items” as a placeholder for work to be done by CXone Professional Services to route work item claims to agents.
  3. Next, Bo created a work item point of contact in CXone, and in it referenced the skill and the empty Studio script.
  4. Bo had her Classics developer create the claim app to collect the needed claim information from the field reps. They used the CXone Work Item API call in the code of the app to submit the claim, via the point of contact Bo had created, to the CXone system.

    The API call sends the following information to CXone from the app:

    • pointOfContact: Name of the point of contact that Bo created.
    • workItemID: Any unique ID for this contact, which for Bo’s system was an incrementing number as a unique number.
    • workItemPayload: This is the “payload,” the information agents will need to process a claim. It is a string, in a format similar to a JSON string with ordered pairs such as the following:

      {"RepID": 1234567,"RepFirstName": "Bo","RepLastName": "Peep","ClaimInfo": "Sheep lost on Rocky Ridge","ClaimValue": "$127.36","FurtherInfo": "Call me at (123) 123-1234 if you have questions about this claim."}

    • workItemType: A preferred descriptive string to differentiate types of work items, such as “Lost-Sheep Claim”.
    • from: A “from” string of choice, describing where the work item came from “Field Rep Claim API”. This is only for reporting, such as the Contact History report.
  5. Bo worked with a CXone Professional Services programmer to have the script created, which replaces the empty script she created earlier. Each time the Classics API submits a claim to the point of contact, the script runs. It receives the information from the API call, requests an agent on the appropriate skill, and upon receiving the work item, presents it to the answering agent, through RunApp action call.

You can see Bo's work in the task instructions and screenshots for setting up work items.

Key Facts About Work Items

  • Work items require initial configuration by Professional Services.
  • Work items can be used for inbound items only.
  • In the Bo Peep example, the payload of the Work Item API call was fairly detailed. For payloads with less information, you could instead turn on screen pops in the skill, which automatically show the raw contents of the payload.
  • When you set up a work item skill, you can specify whether the work items initially enter the real-time queue or the persistent queue. The persistent queue causes the work item script to sleep between the time the ReqAgent action occurs and when the work item is delivered to an agent. In that time, you can't perform actions on the work item, but it is still tracked and reported as usual. When you utilize the persistent queue, you can queue up to 100,000 work items in a single channel handling environment and up to 5,000 work items in a dynamic delivery environment.
  • When a work item is transferred, CXone maintains the relationship between the initial contact (Master Contact IdClosed The master or parent ID for one or more related contacts. A new master contact ID will be assigned if a contact has been transferred 3 or more times.) and the new contact (transfer). Here's an example from another department at Classics:
    • A work item enters the system and is assigned the same value as both master contact ID and contact ID: 234. Agent Dorothy Gale receives the work item.
    • Dorothy is unable to handle the item and transfers it to John Tinman. The master contact ID for the transferred item is 234 and the contact ID is 567. A relationship to the original item is preserved.
    • If John needed to transfer the work item again, the master contact ID for the newly transferred item would be 567 and the contact ID would be 891.