Understanding user roles and groups in Customer Intelligence 360
Starting out with SAS Customer Intelligence 360 we recommend that you set up the right roles and groups so that everyone on your team will know their areas of focus when using the software. This governance will really facilitate how you work as a team and ultimately get the most out of Customer Intelligence 360. Your SAS administrator will have the ability to assign specific roles and groups for users and should regularly review and keep up to date the list of users.
So what differentiates Roles and Groups?
Roles provide access to specific menu items and pages in the user interface. For example, a Plan Viewer can view planning items. Roles are cumulative therefore an individual user can be assigned multiple roles.
Groups, introduced in our 19.09 release, simplify user roles as you no longer need to assign roles on a user level. Basically, you can apply an action to several users at the same time. Just like for roles you can have one user be part of multiple groups. If a role is added to a group, all members of that group automatically inherit that role.
Categories of roles to set
What are the key roles I need to have set up, independently of how many people in my team are using Customer Intelligence 360?
To understand this we need to differentiate by categories of roles that exist: read-only, edit, configure, administer, publish and default user roles.
Default user roles you do not need to worry about as these are created automatically for new users. These are essentially Viewer roles which will give your users access to the reporting and the insights sections in the interface.
Administer or Publish roles are for what you would consider as “super users” who would be given unrestricted access to create, schedule and publish content. As a SAS administrator you may want to restrict who you give this level of access to, if you even choose that someone other than you will need it.
Configure roles will be useful to assign if you have specific colleagues in your team who focus on adjusting the settings for you, so someone with a more administrative function. If you use Discover specifically you can give someone from your team the task of setting up rules for data collection and just creating events. This person would then be given the role of Discover Admin.
Read-only roles are good to give to team members who just need to look under the hood. For example, a new trainee who is shadowing the team and wants to get familiar with the interface or one of your senior leaders who wants to understand more about what this SAS solution that his budget paid for actually looks like. As mentioned above, by default new users will already be set to view insights and reports, so you may not need to create additional viewer roles.
Edit roles are where you can really specify actions that your team members will take. Depending on the size of your team you can assign roles with very specific tasks or have someone have a broader role allowing them to perform multiple actions across different modules of Customer Intelligence 360, if you are signed up to more than one. If you use multiple modules but have different teams working with each of these, you can also clearly segregate out each user for each module. For example, the Email Designer role will only focus on creating emailing tasks for which you need Engage Email, whereas the Mobile Designer is tasked with creating mobile tasks, only available in Engage Digital.
Events are ubiquitous across the Customer Intelligence 360 modules so as such it can be a great idea to assign the role of Event Designer to one person in your team so that they can focus purely on creating and editing events. Similarly, the Direct Marketing Designer will have a central role in your direct marketing activities, creating and managing the direct marketing tasks. Export File Designer, the latest addition to the available roles in Customer Intelligence 360, will be able to edit or design export templates. If you have existing Direct Marketing Designers they will automatically also be assigned the role of Export File Designer however any new Direct Marketing Designer will not.
Do you have ways of working and roles that you have assigned in your team that have really helped you work efficiently with Customer Intelligence 360? If so, feel free to share more in the comments section.
Cyril Roger
Global Customer Success
