In this article, you will learn about the types of users in Personio Conversations, how roles are assigned, and how to involve external users.

Types of users in Conversations

Conversations distinguishes between two main types of users: experts and requesters.

Expert

An expert is usually a member of a team involved in internal service delivery, who receives and works on requests from employees. This is usually someone from your HR, Finance, Legal, Office IT, or Management teams. They have been assigned the role of expert and therefore can access the Conversations tab in the main navigation bar when they are logged into Personio.

Requester

Notes
▶︎ When a requester submits a request, their employee information appears in the Requester tab of the resulting ticket. This allows the expert to see information, such as their name, role and department, and so on. You can click on the link in the employee's name to easily navigate to their employee profile in Personio. 
▶︎ The employee attributes you can see in the Requester tab depend on which attributes are currently selected via the API credentials in Personio. To manage which attributes are visible in the Requester tab, and to ensure data privacy, see our article on how to implement Conversations.

A requester is someone who submits requests to Conversations but does not receive or work on requests. This would include most employees from other departments. Conversations integrates into Slack and Microsoft Teams (email is enabled by default), providing requesters with a single point of contact and allowing them to submit requests in the way they are used to.

How roles are assigned

Note
When you set up Conversations, all your Personio employees will be transferred, including inactive employees. Also, when you integrate Slack or Microsoft Teams, all existing contacts get transferred to Conversations, including contacts outside your organization. These users will appear in Conversations, however, no email or notification will be sent to them, except if an approval is requested.

During the process of setting up Conversations, the Administrator will need to create a "Conversations Expert" role in Personio. They can then assign to this role the employees who will be taking care of employee requests (the experts). The Administrator will have access to the "Conversations Expert" role by default.

Every employee is automatically assigned the role of requester once you have implemented Conversations.

The table below shows how the two roles are assigned and the access rights for each role.

How to assign an expert role

Note
When you are setting up Conversations, the Administrator must create a custom employee role named "Conversations Expert" and define the access rights as “view all” in the Conversations section. Learn how to create a custom employee role.

To assign the role of expert to an employee, follow these steps:

1. Add the relevant employee to the "Conversations Expert" role. 
2. Once the employee has been assigned the role of expert in Personio, you need to invite them as a user in Conversations. Navigate to Conversations in the main navigation bar in Personio. Conversations will open as a new window.
3. In Conversations, go to Settings > Users > Invite users.

Once the employee has accepted the invitation, they will have access to Conversations in Personio and can manage requests.

Involve external users in requests

Conversations allows you to involve external users as one-off collaborators in replies and internal notes. You can read more in the article Overview of Personio Conversations under the heading External collaboration.

Conversations also allows you to communicate with users who don’t have a company email address. For example, if an external user sends an email to your company domain, you can convert this into a request in Conversations. Requests can also be received from external collaborators within your Slack workspace.

More information

• Create and Manage Teams in Personio Conversations