External Contacts is a comprehensive repository of data about your external organizations and contacts. You can see a streamlined view of all contact and organization data. From there, you can start a call, send an email, or visit a contact’s website directly from a contact’s record. 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 Search External Contacts action to find one or more external contacts based on your search terms. For example, search terms can include phone number, email address, or Twitter handle. This feature is helpful when you want to route existing customers to a specific queue and unknown customers to another queue. 

The Search External Contacts action is available in chat, email, messaging, survey invite, and workflow flows. From a new or existing flow, open a Task or State and and from the toolbox expand the External Contacts container and drag a Search External Contacts action into the task editor. The action name defaults to Search External Contacts. The Search term field can be a literal value or an expression. The system creates or uses a variable for the External Contact Results field.

Action Description

Name

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

Search Term

Enter the search term, such as the phone number, email address, or Twitter name of the contact.

Note: The External Contact Management UI converts valid phone numbers to E.164 format. To search for a term without the conversion, enclose the term in quotation marks. For example, to search for account ID 8005551212, enter the following:  "8005551212". To search for a non-E.164 number, 020-2672-6670, enter "020-2672-6670".

External Contact Results

Type a name for the variable to store the external contact found in this action. To reference this variable in the rest of the flow, type State.<contacts>.

Note: If the system retrieves only one search result, the flow follows the Exact Match output path, and you can reference the found external contact as State.<contacts>[0]. The matching external contact is the first element stored in the variable you specified.

Exact Match path

This path indicates that the search yields a single external contact result.

To direct the route you want the interaction to take, drag the appropriate action below the Exact Match path. For example, an Update Data action, or any other action or combination that follows your company’s flow design.

Multiple path

This path indicates that the search yields multiple external contact results.

To follow the route you want the interaction to take, drag the appropriate action below the Multiple path. For example, a Decision action to narrow the list of results, or any other action or combination that follows your company’s flow design.

Not Found path

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

To follow the route you want the interaction to take, drag the appropriate action below the Not Found path. For example, route this interaction with lower priority than existing customers, or transfer them to a queue designed to help new customers get setup.