If your organization has large numbers of categories or dispositions, staff members and customers must review long lists of menu items to find appropriate options. You can simplify their choices with product linking.

When products are linked to categories, only the linked categories are displayed when customers select products on the customer portal or when staff members select products while working on incidents. When products are linked to dispositions, only the linked dispositions are displayed when agents select products for incidents. Product linking is a powerful tool for enhancing efficiency for both staff members and customers.

Product-category linking is independent of product-disposition linking, so you can enable one or the other or both.

However, implicit linking occurs between the parent levels of products, categories, and dispositions that are linked. Parent products implicitly contain the same links that the leaf products below them contain. In other words, a parent product’s links are “inherited” from their leaf products.

RightNow Service can automatically create links to categories and dispositions based on answers and incidents in the knowledge base, or you can manually define the links for each product. This action replaces all product-category and product-disposition links (including any you have created manually) with the automatically created links.

A link is created for every product-category combination of leaf products and leaf categories associated to answers in the knowledge base. In other words, in any given answer, every leaf product associated with the answer is linked to every leaf category associated with the answer.

A link is created for every product-disposition combination of leaf products and leaf dispositions associated to incidents in the knowledge base that were created within the last 30 days.

Manual links are created by choosing the product, right-click and select Edit.

Now that you have created links, you must enable product linking for them to take effect.

Product-category linking and product-disposition linking are independent, so they are enabled separately. You can enable either or both types of linking.

Product linking in RightNow Service is bidirectional. Besides linking products to categories and dispositions, you can also link categories and dispositions to products.

You might want a product to have the same category or disposition links as another product. In that case you can simply copy the category links or disposition links from the original product, and those links are applied to the product you are editing.

Product linking when working with answers: Regardless of whether “product linking” is enabled and regardless of what categories are linked to products, all products and all categories are available on the Products/Categories tab when you add or edit an answer.

When you select a product that has sub-products (including one or more levels of sub-products), all sub-products below the product you selected are also selected, all the way down to the leaf level. Any parent product levels are also selected implicitly.