About Users, Roles, Actions, and Permissions

Users

A user is an individual — an administrator, manager, or agent — who has a distinct identification with which they log in to the application to perform specific functions. Users are assigned roles and permissions, which enable then to perform various tasks. To make it easier to administer a large number of users, users can be organized into named groups. For more details, see About Users.

User Groups

User groups are a collection of users that share similar functions or roles in the system. Groups make it much easier to manage user accounts. Like users, user groups can also be created in the business partition and departments. For more details, see About User Groups.

Licenses

Licenses are essential for users of the application. Every user in the application must have the necessary licenses to sign in and utilize various functions within the application. Some licenses can be assigned to individual users, but no licenses can be assigned to user groups. For more details, see About Licenses.

User Roles

A role is a set of permissible actions for various business resources. An agent’s role, for instance, would include actions such as Edit customer and Add notes. You can create user roles as per the needs of your organization, and assign these roles to your employees. To ease your task, the system comes with some default user roles. You can use these, and if required, create your own user roles. You can assign one or more roles to a group of users or an individual user.

The default user roles are:

Administrator: The administrator is the manager of the department, and has access to the Administration Console. You will find that there are two types of administrators that the system allows you to create partition administrators and department administrators. A partition administrator has to be created while installing the application.

A department administrator is created by the partition administrator, and has the authority to create all the resources for the department he administers. For example, setting rules for incoming and outgoing activities through workflows, creating codes and classifications, dictionaries, users, and assigning permissions to the users to perform various tasks.

Agent: An agent is a person who handles customer queries and is directly in contact with the customer. The agent has access to the Advisor Desktop. Agents are created by the administrator of the department.
Agent (Read Only): An agent (read only) has access to the Advisor Desktop, but is unable to compose replies for customer queries. He can only view them. This role can be assigned to trainees.
Analyst: An analyst is a person who reviews and interprets the data retrieved and displayed in eGain Analytics.
Author: An author is the writer of all the articles that agents can use as replies to customer queries. An author has access to the Knowledge Console, which is a storehouse for all company articles.
Botmaster Administrator: A botmaster administrator can view and manage the configurations of all the bots in the deployment.
Botmaster Analyst: A botmaster analyst can view the transcripts of all the customer conversations with the bots in the deployment. Analysts use this data to understand how bots are performing and fine-tune them for better customer experience.
Knowledge Manager: A knowledge manager can do all the tasks that a user with the author role can do. In addition to that, he can manage article types and templates and configure knowledge workflows from the Knowledge Console.
Offer Manager: An offer manager has access to the Offers Console. He can create offers and configure pages where offers should be presented. He can also monitor the success of offers by viewing dashboards and analytics data.
Social Media Manager: A social media manager has access to the Social capabilities in the Advisor Desktop. He configures adapters, search terms, monitors the social activity from the Social Inbox, and creates activities and cases for the search results.
Supervisor: A supervisor has access to the specific controls in the Advisor Desktop and creates monitors for queues, user groups, and users in a department.
Supervisor (Read Only): A user with the supervisor (read only) role can create and run monitors. Such a user cannot create reports, but can run the reports for which the user has view and run permissions.

Actions

When you create a user role, you need to specify the work that the person with that role can handle. Actions define this work. All default user roles are already assigned certain actions. You can view these actions by clicking any role and you can use these actions to create new roles.

Permissions

Permissions allow you to give users access to particular business objects, such as knowledge folders, queues, data access links, etc. To be able to give a permission, the user must first be assigned the appropriate action associated with the object. For example, for knowledge folders if you want to give the View Folder permission to a user, you have to make sure that the user is first assigned the View Folder action.