Customer Identification

Customer Identification flow for authenticated & external customer store.

On this page

When customers interact with the business on a media channel, the interaction is linked to a Conversation object. There could be several options for linking an interaction to a Conversation object. 

See also:  

• Web Customer Identification

• Segment User Identification approach

• Segment Identity Specs

Anonymous Visitor Access

When a customer starts an interaction with the system for the first time, the system tries to identify it. The following cases might appear during this identification process:

1. Customer identified passively with a session (example: anonymous website visitor on a website, for ex with a Google Analytics Client Identifier)

2. Positively identified with a customer identity (account number, phone number, email, social media identity,...)

Naming the anonymous customers

For all anonymous customers, the system creates customer profiles with a default name “John Doe“. This may, however, be changed and set to a more suitable name as per the requirements of the business.

To change the default value of the name,

1. Log on to AgentDesk Application, with an administrative access.

2. Go to the Customer Schema page from the main menu

3. Click the First name field

4. Provide a suitable customer name here. This name will be used for all anonymous customer profiles.

The technical solution is available on Customer Identification - Use cases and Technical Solution. 

Related Bugs

• CIM-9017

Irrelevant: 

• pre-authenticated customer: Before the chat is started, customer either gets authenticated, or fills a pre-chat form to provide this identity key.

Use Cases

Use case 1:

Customer profile is managed by Expertflow Customer Profile module. 

Solution Workflow:

• Hybrid chat receives a new chat request along with the Customer Channel ID as a parameter.

• CCM will call the CIM API to see if we have a customer profile. If this is a new customer, CIM will create an anonymous customer profile and attach customer channel ID to it. 

• A conversation will be created and attached to the recently created customer profile in CIM. 

• All future conversations from this Channel ID will always be linked to the the same customer profile.

• Control bot, if required, can call the third-party data source using the exposed APIs from that third-party system to fetch detailed customer information.

Points to ponder:

EF Agent-Desk as Agent Frontend

• CIM will always have a ton of anonymous customer profiles unless an agent or an administrator changes the customer info (customer name, phone number etc.) from the Agent Desk either while handling the chat using the right panel window, or later on from the CIM customer list view.

• Customer name and other customer info will not be part of the channel session data and will not be displayed on the locations withing agent desk where the customer name is usually displayed. Agent will see "Anonymous customer/John Doe" every time unless the customer profile is updated in CIM.

Third-party user interface as Agent Frontend:

• CIM will always have a ton of anonymous customer profiles unless CIM customer profile is somehow updated using an API call, passing the customer name and other details.

• Customer name and other customer info will not be part of the channel session data and it is the responsibility of the relevant teams developing the agent front end to fetch and display customer name and other details to agent from the third-party data source.

Usecase 2a: Mapping with 3rd party CRMs

Keep externalCustomerID as part of the Customer object in CIM Customer. 

Useful when: 

• 3rd party CRM is not capable of managing identity profiles of a customer

• doesn't provide APIs/data that Expertflow needs for customer identification

Flow: 

• On an interaction request, the ChannelManager will create CIMCustomer with externalCustomerID as third-party CRM ID. The customer is considered to be a known customer.

Use case 3: Customer profile and interaction profile both in third-party CRM

• While creating a customer profile in CIM, CCM can use received data to create appropriate profiles with customer name and other available data.