Workflow Rules for Scoring

Modules>CRM Overview>Customer Setup link>Scoring child form tab> expand the customer action type child form>expand the category>go to an Action Type>add scoring workflow.

Workflow Rule Overview

A Workflow Rule is tied to a NetForum object. A Workflow Rule is a process that is triggered when the object is inserted, updated, or deleted.

This help topic addresses the following:

• Configuring a Scoring Workflow Rule
• Filtering Workflow Rules
• Issue with Backfilling History
• Exclude From Bulk Processing Checkbox
• Bulk Delete Non-Qualifying Actions Option

Configuring a Scoring Workflow Rule

In order for Customer Actions to be added in NetForum, a special type of Workflow Rule needs to be added for the Action Type. For Action Types that ship with NetForum, a Workflow Rule may already exist, but it might be inactive; in those cases, you must edit the Rule to and select the Active flag to enable the Rule.

To setup a Customer Action Workflow Rule, complete the following steps:

1. Go to Modules>CRM Overview>Customer Setup link>Scoring child form tab>expand the customer action type child form.
2. Click the folder icon to expand the category.
3. Click the go to arrow icon beside the Action Type. The Customer Action Type Profile opens.
4. Once you are on the Customer Action Type Profile, click the add scoring workflow icon.

   This will open the Edit - Add Workflow Scoring pop-up window.

5. Expand the customer key column drop-down menu.
6. Select the option that will generate the scoring activity. This will determine who gets credit for the action (for instance, the person who generated the request or the person who responded to the request.)
7. Expand the action date column drop-down menu.
8. Select the option that specifies when the scoring activity is generated. Normally this is the add date (i.e. when the customer action took place or was added to the system.)
9. Click the Save button.

   Expanding the scoring workflow child form on the Customer Action Type Profile will display the newly created workflow rule.

Filtering Workflow Rules

• Scoring Workflow Rules must have only one Workflow Task which will be the Action task type.
• Ordinarily, the Workflow Rule will insert a Customer Action for every possible record.
• You may optionally include a filter in the Rule, based on the data object control and value settings of the Rule.

  For example, the Workflow Rule for Merchandise Purchases uses ivd_prc_prd_ptp_key for the data object control and {MerchandiseProductTypeGuid} for the value to trigger rule. This is done to avoid having to insert a customer action for every invoice detail, even those that might not be needed for scoring.

  Note: If you filter these, then every other Rule on the same Object must implement an equivalent control/value filter to ensure that duplicate customer actions aren't inserted.

Issue with Backfilling History

The Workflow Rule for an Action Type is used to create Customer Actions in real-time, and can also be used to back-fill historical customer actions.

In the latter case, NetForum generates a SQL command to bulk insert customer action records. The columns you select for the action date and customer key are based on controls in the action type's Object. These column names must also be available in the Table's List for the object's primary table, in order for NetForum to generate the SQL command. Moreover, if one of the columns is in a From Table that is not the "main" From Table, that From Table cannot have an alias and the table on which the From Table is based cannot be duplicated (which would not be possible anyway because that condition would require an alias).

You may find in some cases that Customer Actions cannot be created in real-time because the Object does not parse a particular field even when the field is provided in the list; you'll see this if you have an error message in the Error Log with a message like this:

The statement has been terminated.
Cannot INSERT the value NULLINTOCOLUMN'acn_cst_key',TABLE'NFEP2011Test.dbo.co_customer_action'; COLUMN does NOT allow nulls.INSERT fails.

In these cases, if the Object doesn't parse the particular field in regular operations, then the only way you can insert these customer actions is with a Task as described in back-fill historical customer actions. This will happen only if the field you're trying to parse is not in the "main" table but instead is in a second order table.

An example of this is Event Registrations for which you want the registrant's organization to have a Customer Action. The link to the organization is by way of the reg_ixo_key which specifies a particular row in co_individual_x_organization. Based on that row, the value of ixo_org_cst_key should be the Customer Key to use. The baseline Events Registration object, however, does not select all the values in the related co_individual_x_organization row, which means that ixo_org_cst_key is not available. Therefore, you'll need to create these actions by the scheduled task.

Exclude From Bulk Processing Checkbox

A number of scheduled tasks will process every Action Type and their Scoring Weights. If you want to exclude an Action Type from that, then select this checkbox. You might want to do this if the Action Type has many records and you want to schedule operations on this Action Type in a more controlled manner.

Bulk Delete Non-Qualifying Actions Option

Selecting this option will cause certain scheduled tasks to requalify any existing customer actions that have already qualified. If those actions no longer qualify, then they will be deleted and scores will adjust accordingly.

Although you might think you'd always want this option selected, do so carefully because you might have Scoring Weights that have fluid eligibility criteria that might be true one day and false the next, but you still want to "keep" the points that were awarded originally. Abila believes this sort of eligibility needs to be thought through carefully because if it's that fluid, then maybe it should not be the basis for awarding points.

Generally, Abila recommends selecting this option as this option will sweep up any records that no longer qualify but somehow didn't get removed when they should have.

Most of the Action Types for accounting transactions should have this option turned on. By design, Abila configured the Scoring Workflow Rules for accounting transactions to run as fast as possible and to cause minimal drag on everyday NetForum activities. To this end, the Rules for these are triggered only on Insert and Delete but not on Update. This causes a gap because if a user should edit an invoice or invoice details (such as returning an item), this could have the effect of disqualifying the original customer action. Rather than have Workflow trigger an instant requalification on updates, we suppress that on updates in order to reduce drag. These actions are requalified by the daily All Scales Maintenance scheduled task which can run off hours and work more efficiently in bulk operations compared to one-record-at-a-time real-time operations.

Additionally, certain accounting transactions might not always access the expected object handlers that would trigger the Scoring Workflow Rule to fire and requalify existing customer actions. The All Scales Maintenance task will take care of these.