Topics are a critical part of iService. They are used to organize answers within the iService knowledge base and to create message queues for routing questions to agents. Topics are organized into a hierarchical topic tree as "branches" or topic categories that can be publicly visible or private.
For information about creating and managing topics, see the Topic Settings chapter.
How topics affect message queues
Every interaction in iService is associated with a topic. For incoming questions, the topic helps determine the skills required to provide the answer. For example, a technical support topic might require that agents have a technical skill to answer its questions.
The organization of your topics is driven by the way you do business with your customers. In some environments, requests can be handled by anyone on the team. In these cases the nature of the question might be the most important way to categorize topics (e.g., Shipping, Returns, Refunds, etc.). In other cases, you might have teams of people dedicated to a single client or group of clients. In those cases the name of the client or vertical market might be a more appropriate way to categorize topics.
The interaction properties that you see when working with questions are also driven by the topic. When topics are created, the appropriate interaction properties are associated with them. For example, technical support questions might have a property named "Priority" or "Severity". Or, questions about returns might have a property named "Return Reason." These properties are shown based on how the interaction's topic is configured.
Since topics are used for generating metrics and business intelligence, it's important to ensure questions are associated with the correct topic. When working with an interaction, use the change topic button to re-queue a question that is in the wrong topic.
 Use the change topic action to fix questions in the wrong topic
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How topics affect the knowledge base
The iService knowledge base is a collection of articles organized within a hierarchical topic tree. iService uses the same topic structure for presenting answers in the knowledge base as it does for queuing and routing questions.
Knowledge base articles are interactions in the iService database, just like questions and answers. They have all the same attributes as other interaction types (subject, body, etc.). Rather than determining routing or queuing, the topic associated with a knowledge base article is used for categorization.
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