Understanding authors in Khoros Care

In Khoros Care, an author is an account on a network (e.g. a social media network, a
community, or a CRM system). A person is an actual human who may have multiple authors on the same source channel and across multiple source channels.

Your calls to Care APIs and data in Care Analytics exports will typically use Author IDs than
Person IDs, but understanding the author/person relationship is helpful
for understanding a response.

The Author Profile viewed by an agent in Khoros Care shows all
associations for a given author. For example, the Author Profile for Mary Smith
might be associated with these unique Author entities:

• her Twitter handle (@MarySmith)
• her community login (MaryS)
• and her CRM system ID (3049320)

These unique author entities are bundled in Care as a Person – Mary Smith.
Each Person stored in Care has a unique ID. This is an ID that is used internally
by Care and appears in the response for Author calls, but is not exposed in the UI.

A customer like Mary might have multiple Facebook, CRM, Twitter, and Khoros
Community accounts. When a Care agent views information for Mary, we want to display
all that we know about her to provide the agent with as many details as possible.

If a conversation with an agent is started by the Twitter handle @Mary Smith, Care will also show information about Mary's Facebook and CRM accounts as long as those accounts exist in Care. Via the Person ID, we can associate the various author accounts.

A different customer (John Doe) has their own Person ID. None of Mary’s Author records would be associated with any Author records tied with John's Person record.