Conversation Integration Guide
Overview
Rithum's Dsco platform supports retailers and suppliers having direct message conversations with each other on the platform. Customers find this feature useful because they can easily initiate a conversation thread on an order or on an item that is being setup or on a return and the context of the conversation is saved as part of the conversation thread. This makes it easy for a trading partner to find and act on the messages of the conversation since the context of that conversation is explicitly known.
Approach
Conversations, and thus the messages within them, are always between exactly one retailer and one supplier. For now, the Dsco platform has elected to not do direct person to person communication due to privacy concerns and the use cases this feature is meant to solve. Instead, a message is shared by a retailer or supplier with a specific trading partner, for a supplier it's a single retailer and for a retailer it's a single supplier. The message can be seen and responded to by any user at either the retailer or supplier who are associated with the conversation.
Either a retailer or supplier may create a Conversation.
Details
Either a retailer or supplier may use the Create Conversation API to create a conversation and optionally include an initial message to add to the conversation.
You will be required to designate which of your partners you want to have a conversation with when you create
the conversation. You will also be required to specify the context of the conversation in the
context attribute. Below are the different contexts supported.
Account Context
Use the account context to initiate an arbitrary conversation with a trading partner.
Order Context
Use the order context to have a conversation around a single order. You will have to specify which specific Order object you mean to have the conversation around.
Catalog Context
Use the catalog context to have a conversation about item setup or about catalog content attributes on a given item. You will have to specify which Item Catalog object you mean to have the conversation around.
Inventory Context
Use the inventory context to have a conversation about inventory of a given item. You will have to specify which Item Inventory object you mean to have the conversation around.
Contract Context
Use the contract context to have a conversation about a contract shared from a retailer to a supplier. You will have to specify which Contract object you mean to have the conversation around.
Invoice Context
Use the invoice context to have a conversation about an invoice. You will have to specify which Invoice object you mean to have the conversation around.
Return Context
Use the return context to have a conversation about a return. You will have to specify which Return object you mean to have the conversation around.
Conversation Status
Conversations have a life cycle, captured in the status attribute. Newly created conversations
that do not have a message added to them will be in the new state. Conversations that
have at least one message added to them will be in the in_progress state. Conversations that
have been explicitly closed or where there hasn't been activity for an extended period of time and
were automatically closed will be in the closed state. You may not add messages to a conversation
that is closed. You may reopen a conversation by updating its status to in_progress.
Customer Care Conversations
Customer care is one of the fundamental conversation types supported to facilitate getting end consumer feedback via a retailer to a supplier whose responses are routed back to the end consumer via the retaier. Please reference the Customer Care Integration Guide for more information.