A Consumer is the individual that is receiving the service as specified on the job. It is not mandatory for an agency to use the Consumer within II, but this feature will allow you to specify interpreter exclusions and preferences, to have a job history for the same Consumer and to associate Consumers with Customers if preferred.
To create a Consumer:
- Click on the green ‘Create New Consumer’ button on the top right hand side of the Dashboard, or
- Navigate to the ‘Manage’ Menu and select ‘Create New’ from the ‘Consumers’ section.
This will open the ‘General Information’ tab:
- as you may have limited information on Consumers, the only required fields are First Name and Last Name
- Ensure that the Active flag is enabled
- If you do have additional information for the Consumer, such as phone number, email address etc. this will prove useful when creating jobs, especially if you have a large consumer database, as you will be able to search for a specific Consumer, not only by their name, but also by other parameters on the profile, such as Email, Phone Number or Record Number. Also, if you use the Video (Scheduled) service, the Consumer will be emailed a link to the video session on the job, if an email address is stored on their profile, which will allow them to access the video conference without any assistance from a Requestor.
On the ‘Exclusions & Preferences’ tab, you can select any Interpreters that are excluded from working with this Consumer - these Interpreters will not appear in the eligible list of Interpreters when assigning jobs for this Consumer. And you can select Preferred Interpreters for this Consumer:
- Start typing the Interpreter name in the Manage Exclusions box
- Select from the dropdown menu and click Add
- The Interpreter is then stored in the resulting Exclusions table and this can be deleted at any time by selecting the x in the Remove column
- Repeat this process in the Manage Preferences section - Preferred Interpreters will be designated as such when assigning jobs for this Consumer
Moving to the Customers tab - Consumers can be company-wide (default) or Customer-Specific. If Consumers are set to be Customer-Specific, when Requestors enter new jobs on the Customer portal, they will only be able to select from a list of Consumers associated with them as a Customer. If you would like to switch to the Customer-Specific Consumer setup, please contact support@interpreterintelligence.com for further details as there are a number of steps for this configuration.
On the Criteria tab you may specify Criteria required for working with this Consumer.
On the Audit History tab you can access a record of updates, and by whom, made to the Consumer since creation.
As always, don’t forget to click the blue Save button in the navigation pane on the left hand side anytime an update is made to a Consumer record.
You can access Consumer records by using the ‘Manage’ Menu and select ‘Manage Consumers’ from the ‘Consumers’ section. From here you can :
- Filter the data by typing into any of the columns at the top of the table, note that you can only filter by data stored on the Consumer profile
- Use the dropdown menu next to any Consumer to View, Edit or take other actions on the relevant Consumer
- Export data for reporting purposes etc.