Data Field Maintenance

1. Data Field Maintenance

Data field maintenance allows you to standardise Multichannel to match common terminology used by your organisation.

Data Field Maintenance can be accessed and edited by Admin Users.  Click on the option = ‘Data Field Maintenance tab as follows;

Screen displays:

Data Field Groups determine:

• The custom data fields that will appear within the ENGAGE message console, and
• The display sequence within same.

The display order for some areas of the ENGAGE message console are fixed within ‘data field groups’, that is the display of Address Info, Contact Info and Groups is fixed displaying in the sequence;

• Contact Info – This is the data that is held in data field maintenance for the section = ‘Contact Types’. The display order assigned to this name = 1
• Address Info – This is the data that is held in data field maintenance for the section = ‘Customer Fields’. The display order assigned to this name = 3
• Groups – this is the listing of all active customer groups (from Admin – Customer Groups).  The display order assigned to this name = 9999

By default all of the ‘Contact Types’ with the exception of the Generic Channels will show as being the members within the group named Contact Info.  Generic Channels 1 and 2 will only display in the members section for ‘Contact Info’ if the channel itself is configure on your site. 

The only members that will appear as being part of the Address Info group will be those entries that appear in data field maintenance for the section = ‘Customer Fields’ where the field is editable and the field name has been assigned a display order value. It is possible to re-label any of the editable fields within ‘Customer Fields’ to suit your business terminology.  Please note however that you are not able to re-label any field that matches an existing data base field name. For example you may want to re-label Address3 to have a field name of City – this will not be possible even if you change the field mapping name of the City field itself.   Address 3 would need to labelled something other than City because it clashes with an existing database name.

The only members that will appear as being part of the ‘Groups’ group will be those active customer groups (as found in admin – customer groups).

In addition to the manipulation of the display order within the ENGAGE message console you can assign any of the Generic Customer Fields to any grouping that you define for your business. This allows you to put ‘like’ groupings of customer data together and to determine the sequence upon which this data is displayed to each agent within the ENGAGE message console.

Fields can be named using alpha-numeric characters, spaces, hyphens and colons.

Enabling and making visible any generic customer data field will result in the field appearing in the Customer Console section within MC.

In order for the same field to be visible in the CRM of ENGAGE then the Generic Customer Field must be enabled and visible and be assigned to a group and have a display order assigned to it. 

Enabling also allows for any generic customer field to be available for use within certain template messages and within snippets.

Please note that even though you re-label any of the customer fields they will not appear in templates or within snippets as anything other than the name assigned them in the Db. Nor will you see anything other than the Db name appear within the Customer Console of the MC site itself.  For example Address 1 will display as ‘Address1’ within templates / snippets and the Customer Console of MC whereas to the agent processing messages the customer record itself will show Street Address;

There are different categories of Data Fields – these can be found by clicking on the data field maintenance tab. When you click on the data field maintenance tab the default view is Generic Customer Fields. Click on the drop down list to change data type

1. Generic Customer Fields

We can have up to 30 ‘short fields’ – to store information up to 255 characters. – ShortField01 to ShortField30.

We can also have up two 2 ‘long fields’ – to store information that is unlimited in length – LongField01 and LongField02.

We can also have up to 2 ‘date time fields’ - This allows the user to click on a pop up calendar allowing for easy selection of an applicable date in the extended customer screen in the Message Console. – DateTime01 and DateTime02

Configuration of individual fields is accessed by clicking on the Edit button   to the right of the field name itself.

The fields available to edit are the same for all Data Field types and are described in the table below.  All Data Types share common configurable fields with the exception of Customer Fields and Contact Types – these 2 fields have limited configuration / alteration as described previously.

1. Message Data Fields

The functionality to store values in the message data tables is available in this release of MC but there is no visibility within the ENGAGE Message Processing screens to display the extracted message data values.

The message data fields are used in conjunction with the extraction handler – automatically extracting content from a message and updating it to separate fields in the system. 

1. Customer Fields

Field names are not editable, however regular expression validation is editable if you are a super user.  If any field is able to be edited then you can also nominate a new field mapping (not cannot match any existing Db mapping) and a display order – both of which work with ENGAGE CRM but not within the Customer Console of MC.

1. Contact Types

The view below is that of a super user.  It is included in the manual so Admin agents can see the regex rules applicable to each of the channels.  With the exception of email addresses the values as held in any phone number field must be digits only and being anything from 4 to 16 digits in length.  An email regex is basically checking that the address details adhere to that of an email – some characters then an @ then more characters then a . then more characters (very loosely speaking).

Entering a regular expression (regex) validation into these fields will validate the data entered into these fields for all the data entered on the site.  Mobile, Email and Fax regex validation is set on all sites by default.

1. Incident Fields

As the incident module feature is not available in this release of Multichannel there is no need to enter any incident data.

1. Resource Fields

As the incident module feature is not available in this release of Multichannel there is no need to enter any resource data.