Conversation stitching

Learning and mastering the best practices of each channel is a massive undertaking for your team. Balance that with the thought of providing support, and it may feel impossible to make any headway. How can you keep all of these distinct channels strong while keeping your agents efficient, effective, and informed across channels?

The solution is omnichannel customer engagement. Omnichannel is the foundational support platform that weaves each key digital channel together, seamlessly integrating them into a single console.

Omnichannel customer engagement can be a challenge for many with agents often jumping between inboxes. What we’ve done to facilitate this kind of communication is introduce Conversation stitching within the OneView Inbox. 

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What is conversation stitching?

When you’re having a conversation with a user across multiple touchpoints, it’s easy to lost track of the conversational context. Conversation stitching allows you to manage these conversations with ease by pulling all your conversations across multiple channels into a OneView inbox. It also stitches these conversations together using unique identifiers like the user’s phone number and email address. This ensures that your support agents always have context from past interactions and your customers never have to repeat themselves.

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Why do we want to stitch conversations?

The conversation streams (the back and forth communication between two or more people) are now often not contained within a channel. We are seeing our communications move across channels, which can be good as this is fluid and keeping with our digital presence. More often than not we are seeing our communication streams fracture across channels. 

This fracturing becomes really apparent when we are trying to reconstruct our communication stream. This fracturing and attempting to stitch the stream back together become more common for those moving into and across many applications and devices with their own messaging systems.

The communication streams fracture as we pick up an idea or need from Twitter, then a direct response in Twitter that moves it to SMS, the SMS text message is responded to in regular SMS outside of Twitter, a few volleys back and forth in SMS text. One person leaves a voicemail, it is answered in an e-mail, there are two responses back and forth in e-mail, an hour later both people are on Skype and chat there, in Skype chat they decide to meet in person.

Having the communication fractured across channels makes reconstruction of the conversation problematic today. The conversation needs to be stitched back together using time stamps to reconstruct everything. The misunderstanding revolved around recommendations as one person understands that to mean a written document and the other it does not mean that].

Increasingly the reality of our personal and professional lives is this cross-channel communication stream. Some want to limit the problem by keeping to just one channel through the process. While this is well-intentioned, it does not meet the reality of today. Increasingly, informal networking leads to meaningful conversations, but the conversations drift across channels and mediums. As it currently stands, pushing a natural flow does not seem to be the best solution in the long run.

How to stitch conversations?

User conversations will be stitched if you meet the following conditions–

• The attribute user.phone_number should have the same value.
• The attribute user.email should have the same value.
• Both the attributes user.phone_number and user.email have the same value.

You can use the ‘Set User attribute‘ node and update the values to the attributes mentioned above.

You can also update them manually by navigating to the Conversations section.

Additional Attributes – The attributes created in the flow will be displayed here. If the attribute has an empty value, then a ‘-‘ would be shown.