External contacts are individuals such as employees of companies you do business with or direct customers. These people request help from your agents. For more information about Genesys Cloud’s External Contacts feature, see About External Contacts and About creating a repository of customer data.

In Architect, use the Get External Contact action to retrieve information about an existing external contact. The Get External Contacts action is available in call, email, chat, messaging, workflows, bot flows, and survey invite flows. From a new or existing flow, open a task or state. From the toolbox, expand the External Contacts container and drag a Get External Contacts action into the task editor.

Action Description

Name

 Type a name for the action. The label you enter here becomes the action’s name displayed in the task sequence.

External Contact ID

Enter a literal value or expression in the External Contact ID field. Architect creates a variable for use with the External Contact Result field.

External Contact Result

Type a name for the variable to store the external contact found in this action. You can reference this variable in the rest of the flow.

Note: If the system only retrieves one search, the flow follows the Exact Match output path. The matching external contact is the first element stored in the variable you specified.

Found path

This path indicates that the system successfully located the external contact.

To follow the route you want the interaction to take, drag the appropriate action below the Found path. For example, a Send Auto Reply action, a Decision action, or any other action or combination that follows your company’s flow design. For survey invite flows, add a Complete Survey action.

Not Found path

This path indicates that the system was unable to locate the external contact.  

To direct the route you want the interaction to take, drag the appropriate action below the Not Found path. For example, route the interaction with lower priority than existing customers, or transfer them to a queue designed to help new customers get set up. For survey invite flows, add an Abort Survey action.