This article explains how to implement Personio Conversations. You will learn how to add Conversations to your Personio plan and how to set up the necessary steps in order to use Conversations.

Step 1: Add Conversations to your plan

Conversations is available as an additional package for customers on all Personio plans. To add Conversations to your plan, contact your Growth Manager. Some functionalities, including SLAs, custom request statuses, and certain Analytics features, are only available to customers on the Premium package. 

Step 2: Access Personio Conversations for the first time

Initial setup

The Personio Administrator at your company will first need to create a “Conversations Expert” employee role in Personio and define the appropriate access rights. Administrators have access to this role by default and therefore do not need to assign the role to themselves.

If someone else at your company is responsible for driving the implementation, then the Administrator will need to assign them the role. This person will closely collaborate with Personio during the setup process. This person will be your first expert and should perform the tasks listed below.

Note
To activate Personio Conversations for the first time, the Administrator must click on the Conversations section in the main navigation bar in Personio. This will complete the initial setup.

Manage employee attributes visible in the Requester tab

In Conversations, the Requester tab within a request provides the expert with information about the requester. This information is taken from the requester's employee profile in Personio and is based on employee attributes.

These attributes include preset attributes, including the name of the requester, their status, contact details, and role and department. It is also possible to allowlist other attributes, including custom attributes, via the API credentials in Personio in order to make these attributes visible in the Requester tab.

Note
Only allowlist the attributes that you want to be visible in the Requester tab. This is to ensure that those with the role of expert cannot see sensitive employee information. Certain attributes, like bank details, cannot be transferred via the API credentials.

To manage which employee attributes are visible in the Requester tab, and to ensure data privacy, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Integrations > API credentials and click on Conversations.
2. Under Readable employee attributes, click the drop-down menu to see the full list of employee attributes.
3. Select the attributes that you want to transfer to Conversations. These attributes will appear in the Requester tab.
4. Click Save.

Step 3: Assign roles and set up teams

The first expert should perform the following steps:

1. Assign the "Conversations Expert" role to all other experts. Note: Only those with Administrator access can assign roles.
2. Create the first teams. Tip: After you have integrated Slack (see the final step below), you can add the associated Slack channels to the relevant teams using the edit teams function.
3. Edit teams: add and remove members, edit working hours and assign team categories.
4. Create custom request statuses.
5. Set up SLAs.

Note
Request status customization and SLAs are only available to customers on the Premium package.

Step 4: Integrate Slack or Microsoft Teams

Once you have familiarized yourself with Conversations, you can set up the integration with Slack or Microsoft Teams. (It might be necessary to coordinate with your IT department.) You can now begin to respond to requests that are sent through Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Tip
We recommend integrating Slack or Microsoft Teams, however, this is not a prerequisite to using Conversations, as email is enabled by default.