If you ever have the scenario that an interview needs to be available to both logged-in Customer Portal users and non-logged people who just swing by, then the combination of Oracle B2C Service and Oracle Intelligent Advisor has got you covered. There are in fact several things you can leverage.
- The special attribute called user type. This gives you easy access to a value like “Anonymous, Contact, or Account” so you know what kind of situation you are in:
- The fact that you can then leverage the above attribute to, for example, hide screens when the situation arises. For example in a project where we are either loading an existing Contact (if you are logged in) or creating a new Contact (if you are not logged in) then this will be helpful:
Then you will need to configure the Connection to Service Cloud to ensure that it copes with the “mixed-mode” scenario and you will also probably want to select something like the following setup. Notice that both Anonymous and Contact users are selected in the first section, and then we have selected Create / Update Contact.
The extra checkbox is a common requirement too – what happens if the user is actually registered on our Customer Portal but just didn’t log in? If you check that Anonymous users can link to existing Contact then you get the ability to let them finish whatever they were doing (probably creating an incident) and link it to their existing Contact record thanks to the email address that you ask them for in the interview (Email-Primary) .
If you don’t use this checkbox, if the registered but not-logged-in user provides their email address in the interview and it already exists in the database they will be unable to finish the interview as they will simply be informed that the email address already exists, with a nice big red error message:
So to avoid all of that, set yourself the Connection like this.
Now you have mixed mode ready to rock, don’t forget to set the B2C Service widget so that Login is not required for the interview.
