External contact management scenarios

Feature coming soon: Single customer view. This feature is currently available in select regions.

The following are some examples of how single customer view, powered by identity resolution, impacts External Contacts:

Scenario Illustration

An unknown contact reaches out

  • Auto-created contact (ephemeral or identified contact) – expires after 60 days, including journey information
  • Agent can promote to permanent, curated contact (Add to Contacts)
  • Agent can merge with existing curated contact (Select Contact)
 The contact panel that shows an unknown contact

A new contact reaches out

  • Agent promotes contact to curated (requires Externalcontacts > Identity > Promote permission)
    Note: Agents do not have to promote auto-created contacts to edit them.
  • Single customer view keeps identifiers (name, email, phone number)
  • Single customer view keeps journey and web visit information
  • New API –  promote contact to permanent curated contact
    For more information, see Contact types and promotion in the Developer Center.

 

 The contact panel that shows a new contact promoted to a curated contact

An existing contact reaches out on a new phone number or messaging channel

  • Agent finds existing contact and merges current contact to an existing permanent curated contact (Select Contact) (requires Externalcontacts > Identity > Merge permission)
  • Single customer view of the contact across identifiers and channels
  • Single customer view merges contact identifiers, journey, and web visits
  • New API for merge restricted to merging auto-created contact to curated
    For more information, see Merging contacts in the Developer Center
    Note: This API replaces the associate API in most use cases.
 The contact panel that shows an existing contact who used a new channel to reach out