hi I'm Alice hi I'm Justin and you're listening to the utterly awesome podcast who knows what we'll talk about speaking of Dan he messes this morning okay remember like a couple episodes ago I told you to Conor a message about the portal and the error message whatever and I stepped forever troubleshooting it it's like 8 30 this morning Dan messages he's like do we have a showcase instance that has virtual agent and chat and service operations yeah sure we do um so I give the name of it and I go I was like do you have a narrative or do you need one he's like no I don't I don't have that much help work because I'm like okay well let me and so I find out basically is not working right um just like the whole other portal issues so two and a half hours later finally good at working I'm just like oh my God and guess what it was it is nope it wasn't a semicolon and it's so stupid like it was so fresh the in our demo environments there is a bunch of cues yes like because you got HR you got it you've got yeah fill in the blank legal whatever so if the if the chat on the portal has multiple matching cues it just goes there's no agents so it's like you need to get the the one you're trying to get to to be the cue to go into has to be the first one basically to make a match and um so I basically had to change the order yeah agent attack q210 in order to get to the top and I was like are you kidding me this is the fix two and a half hours later yeah that's so it's been funny because as we're rebuilding this offering I'm having to like get back into the groove and I'm just like I'm so Rusty at this but it'll be good is this your first exposure to service operations workspace no so we did it on the project I was on last year like right when it came out and it's already better than it was then because it had yeah yeah 1.0 was it was limited on uh future parity I guess you'd say it didn't match everything the old agent workspace did yeah and I feel like it's easier but harder to configure if that makes sense I had to mix total sense this is the UI Builder problem yes like it's easier but it's harder so I'm just like I'm going through because we're trying to figure out where this offering how do we make sure we're giving MVP plus one you know like how do we give a little bit more but still no no technical debt and so we were like oh agent assist only works on these two tables out of box let's make it work on all of them that's our so yeah you just find ways that are helpful but not introducing technical debt but also yeah yeah that makes sense it did but it makes sense to me um I just have so happens it's just a plug for my channel my video today is about the interaction record in service operations voice space are you familiar with the interaction record I am yes do you like the interaction record so as a former service desk employee I love the interactions and I think every customer should start at interactions so you don't know what they're calling about and so if you don't know what they're calling about you have all this garbage in your instance and instead you have your Purgatory record of me figuring out what it is and I actually had categories because on the interaction record correction because I put in like hang ups status call so I can actually see because because I came from a very highly SLA regulated service desk I worked for an airline service desk we had to have at a minimum the number of phone calls the number of Records there had to be an exact match and so even if someone called and hung up we had to create a record for it hmm okay didn't matter and they were really like realistically there should be more records than phone calls because you've got emails you've got walk-ups you've got right all these things and so you just got me on a soapbox I love it I know I love it I love that okay um and this is not to put you on the spot but I think it'd be good for our listeners or viewers what's the difference between and I can help out too an interaction record and a universal request well from my limited exposure slash research Universal is I don't know which department it's going to versus interaction being I've interacted with the service desk in some way yes that's my understanding too my other understanding of universal request is like what it's when it's coming and it's going to go to multiple places yes you can you can go to like HRA and it yeah yeah because I actually got asked that on the project that we did service operations workspace so I had to go read up on it sound intelligent and thankfully they asked me an email yeah okay what would you do if they'd asked you in person and you're like you know that's a near future I'm gonna have to look and find out I'm telling people I don't know things yeah yeah I think we've talked about that yeah you know not just I don't know in statement yeah I don't know let's move on to the next topic because it's not helpful yeah I love interactions the only I guess flaws I've seen or I guess the things people have brought up to me that we're all valid were and these are flaws with interactions if I create a request from the interaction nothing I typed carries over to the request so then I have to remember it all and so I'm in my life we have created like scripts that'll put it on a scratch pad and pull it over but we use the same variable sub because otherwise it wouldn't work so we had a standard variable set that we copied to and then I had another customer that was like well but if it's just one task I don't want my serviced us to then have to go to another page I wanted to take them directly to the task to do the work and I'm like [Music] okay and I was like I get it but also it's like one click into the request yeah can you say that one more time I was writing because I wanted to lose this the tasks so are not so it takes them to the requested item not the task so when you submit through service Ops workspace it just takes you to the same landing pages if you did it from the portal yeah like it's a portal UI almost and so they wanted it to take them to the operations workspace view of the task like they wanted there to be a redirect directly to the task if there weren't approvals and other things because that was an extra click gotcha and so thank God for Chris and he built it for me so yeah oh no these are great these are I'm done stealing these potential content um like I love it I literally could go on a snow Box about interactions per hour no I love this I've been wanting a topic that got you excited and this is finally it um weird one so so the your first example I wrote down the interaction record notes don't copy to the request so if and you said something about a variable set so you'd have to you'd have to know for every request where you're going to copy those notes to right what part what variable within that particular request that's what makes it so hard right yep so we created a common variable set of description and then requested for you should already have a common variable set for who you're requesting for and then we just did one for details as well and almost all of them have an additional information or description or something so we just created a common set and Chris and I worked together at a previous employer and he actually put that one for me there and then at this job he helped me with the redirect to task one so he was probably like oh joy thanks Allison you're probably telling me he was ready for a new job so I didn't know him he called me gotcha and then and he's now a delivery manager right yes yes um I guess we'll have to believe his name but uh Chris yeah um okay so yeah we have to go back a little bit you mentioned a common variables that I know what you're talking about um do you want to elaborate further on what's the difference between a variable set and a common one sure so Within catalog items they're a collection of variables on each form if you have some that you're going to reuse over and over again work smarter not harder create them and you can just reuse the blocks of variables and includes like with requested for I like everything to Auto populate user information and so I'll do requested for contact number just in case they need to change it you know because I need to get a hold of them and then whatever else details and so this urgency a priority or something in the script of Auto populating lives on the variable set so I don't have to rescript every single time okay right anything that's like needs to happen all the time and common variable sets you can also get me on a soapbox about onboarding order guides that's another one that I could talk about for hours when you're doing an order guide the variable sets have to match are the variables will not Cascade down if I fill out everything on the front of my order guide like my name where to send it that will not go down to the other pieces of the order guide if they don't match exactly like the variable name has to match like the first underscore name variable that's the same set not even just match like you have to use this thing okay yeah it's I did not know that interesting I always positioned order guide says your common questions are on the order guide and specific questions are on the individual catalog items but I guess if you truly are pulling in common catalog items they're gonna have the stuff that's on there and how I did them in my past life is everything that I asked on the first page I hit on the subsequent Pages if it was in an order guide so I didn't have to see it again I filled it out on the first page it was hidden in their view but then it showed up for the facility okay and that's a UI policy to hide it and there's a way to know if it's coming from an order guide or not and so you could just I've learned so much in like five minutes this is awesome I love order guides too so and do you know what how how Chris implemented the redirect to a skatask yes sort of like high level like it was one of those times where I was like I don't really care I just need this built and I gave him all the criteria and then it had to do I feel like it was widget-based because within operations workspace they're like widgets and back in our previous life that we worked together like he was my portal Guru my integration Guru and my CSM Guru in the day I think you told me he was Rusty on CSM but everything else he's pretty good yeah they're components in the workspace build now they've renamed it from widgets I think they're trying to get away from the negativity of widgets yeah um not everybody is a fan yeah of the of those but it was um oh and I had him save it off so he has the updates that I'm pretty sure so I'd be interested yeah I I had a similar problem in my PDI where I made a UI action on the classic UI yeah and you would do it and then it would take you back to the list of you yeah and so I had to put in the script a little set redirect to correct I think it would yeah and I wonder if it's similar that's why I was getting I wonder if it's you had to do something similar he showed me all of it but like I said I was in the thres of the project and it was with a customer that we we had fumbled the ball a couple times and then they had some last minute requirements and so it was a somewhat tense area of the project yeah yeah no this is this is fascinating I um this is the most technical we've gotten on our podcast interactions interactions yeah well so I wanted to ask and I had forgot and I remembered um do you know do you remember caller caller records I remember new call records or new call records that's right new call I implemented that too so back not my last partner the one before that every itsm one I would do a new call Workshop even though it wasn't in scope it'd be like you're doing this was very pushy because people didn't know it existed and it never got scoped and the effort was so small yeah like I had a new call update set that I popped in and yeah I remember Rory is doing the thing that Riley does um behind you by the way yeah um so that's hilarious behavior is passed down to um I was in the middle of its implementation and the service desk was frustrated with a couple of things you've already mentioned one of them it was um request details or whatever or not request details it was I've got a call and I don't know if it's in the near request they're just getting frustrated and we found the documentation for the new call recorder This was um not Jakarta it was uh Kingston okay we only rent money yeah and so I made the call as the TSM manager I'm like turn it on get this to get this service desk manager off my back I don't need this right now turn it on and then when I turn it on then I got all the complaints about well now our notes aren't copied into this record or that record it would just blew up on me and I was just like oh my God I thought I was getting rid of a problem oh yeah I know I we'd ended up doing it um and I was trying to remember what all they wanted it so I was very frustrated the last customer I worked for they didn't want to get out of email and I was like why and so I was like why don't we point email into interactions so email created interactions and he he was fine with that and I was like dude you know I yeah I've had like I've had users not service desks that were just email was what they want oh purchasing it was oh um it was like do you not see how waste of the time this is like when you go find a status of something you did three weeks ago I'm like oh they had little PST archives all hanging off the mailbox for each quarter or each year they go until I was like oh my God this is insane no yeah whenever I do an interaction or even new call I would have record producer point to interactions inbound emails everything was based on the interaction Slash new call so that was the entry point for all its yeah I think in hindsight that would have been a smart move on my part but we just turned it on we didn't do the record producer we didn't do the email um that would have solved a whole bunch of problems a bit basically I turned one problem into like 10 new problems is what happened it's fine oh experience is such a joy I know um do you have a hard stop kind of about two minutes till I have another question for you I can probably be a few minutes late okay well let's try to squeeze in real fast we mostly I was texting over the weekend I think you were being nice and saying like you know high or whatever but please tell what happened to your cucumbers because we've been talking about your cucumbers for several episodes and died and so we went where did we go we went to St Louis for the four and we came back and like my plant was dead and so David's sister was watching the plant she's like I wanted it like twice a day every day and I don't know I didn't know how to save it so I don't know if it got too hot I don't know but like all the leaves were dead the one cucumber I had I cut off and trimmed up the leaves and everything because like one of the little branches whatever was turning low and I was like just an instead of cancer yeah it's turning yellow so it must be infected and he was just like what so I took the Cucumber off trimmed up the plant and replanted the seeds and I already have a sprout so we're gonna try again but my bell peppers I'm I still don't have bell peppers but they're growing like the plant is growing but like I don't have yet be patient yeah those are like in the middle of summer kind of thing but it's dead yeah but we gotta do it in common sounds like yeah just to clarify on the yellowish what what you're doing is you're prevent you're preventing the plant becoming fully mature and it thinking it has reproduced and then it just goes I'm done and it will shrivel up and die that's what you're doing a picture after this you can tell me if I just need to dig what's in there up other than the new Sprout like if that whole thing is just dead it's probably dead they're once they start turning they're they're not going to usually come back well I'm gonna get a real raise to bed that I sent you the picture or the yeah have you ordered it yet not yet we're gonna wait because I have girls weekend in Myrtle Beach this weekend and then we have our we have a leadership um Summit the next week no not the week the 24th the week of the 30th so and that I can convince them to go to Myrtle Beach I was like I really don't want to fly anywhere can we go tomorrow so it's a work function but I'm in Europe before your vacation rentals my own bed I just have to drive nice so maybe you could take the team to see the Pelicans apparently Terry has been to the Pelicans I open to the Pelicans we took Dexter for Paw Patrol night I remember yeah it was weiner Friday remember weiner day thank you oh wait I just edited that one I think no no what I can't remember I know it's the last week's after bed was weiner Wednesday yes the one I just edited was um it was just a bunch of random stuff so okay you have to go this is fun thank you for the info on interactions and call records oh this is awesome and uh passion for and interact I love it I love it I need to find more of these little nuggets all right we'll have fun yes try to think of something please maybe Friday wink wink maybe all right see you next time bye foreign [Music] [Music]