API Concepts
MXO is a customer engagement solution that enables you to manage personalized, real-time conversations with your customers across all Touchpoints - web, mobile apps, call centers, social media, and outbound communications - throughout the customer journey.
You can listen to what customers actually do when they interact with your Touchpoints, capture that data to store in the Adaptive Engagement Profile (AEP), and optimize what you show to those customers when they visit your Touchpoints or what you talk to customers about when they call your Contact Center.
To understand the parameters you need to provide when using the API, it is important that you are familiar the major concepts in the MXO solution.
| Name | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Interaction | The activity a customer performs on your Touchpoint. | |
| Context [uri] | The Touchpoint context the customer interaction takes place on. | |
| Customer Key [ck] | Your organization’s customer identifier. A customer key represents an individual customer. | |
| tid [tid] | The unique ID that MXO assigns to each customer visiting a Touchpoint. | Need to maintain and pass in subsequent API calls. |
| Site Key [sk] | The unique identifier for a Space. | Available on the MXO Tag and Space Selection pages in the main MXO UI. |
| Structure | The data formats MXO uses to respond to requests for customer data stored in the MXO customer profile. |
What is a Customer Interaction?
Customer interactions are the types of activities customers perform on your Touchpoints. These might include:
- Making a complaint through your organizations Contact Center
- Requesting a brochure
- Visiting a page on your organizations website
- Checking their bank balance within a mobile banking app on their smartphone
Customer interactions take place at locations, either physical or digital, within your Touchpoints, and trigger contexts.
Customer interactions are represented within MXO as a combination of URI plus Properties, where:
- URI is the Touchpoint and context.For example, salesforce://retail-contact-center/servicing/production-complaint
- Properties are the name=value data pairs that provide MXO with meaningful information.For example:
- productCode=ABC
- campaign=summer2014
- income=20000
What is a Context?
Contexts are the entry point for customer interactions. On a web Touchpoint, a Context may be an individual or group of web pages. On a mobile application, a Context may be a mobile screen. On an Assisted Touchpoint such as a Call Center, a Context may be a customer call reason. Each Context provides a set of instructions, explaining what action to take when a given customer interaction occurs. These instructions are categorized as Track, Capture, and Optimize. For example:
- Track which links a customer clicks on
- Capture information a customer enters into a form
- Optimize what is presented to a customer on a Touchpoint, based on what MXO knows about that customer
What is a Customer Key?
The customer key is the unique identifier provided by a Touchpoint for the current customer. For example, the customer key might be the customer’s CRM ID, login ID, or email address. The customer key is provided by your organisation, not by MXO , and is used to link a customer across multiple Touchpoints. When using the API, the customer key is passed as a parameter.
MXO uses the customer key in a number of ways:
- To link to a known customer on a Touchpoint
- To look up an existing, known customer within MXO
- To link an anonymous customer, tracked using their TID, to a known customer
- To link and merge multiple customer profiles belonging to the same customer
What is a TID?
The TID is the unique generated identifier assigned to each customer who visits your Touchpoints. We expect API users to store the returned TID against a customer within their solution and use it in subsequent requests for that customer.
Does the TID ever change?
Yes, the TID may change if you supply details about a customer key that is already associated with an existing customer in a request. The new TID should be used by your organization to override any TID previously held for the customer.
What is a Site Key?
The Site Key is the unique identifier for a Space that links all Touchpoint activity to that Space. Each Space in your environment has a different site key. You can find the site key for a Space on the MXO Tag and Space Selection pages in MXO .
You can copy and paste the site key into your API calls.
What is a Structure?
Structures are the data formats MXO uses to respond to requests for customer data stored in the AEP. You configure which data attributes to include in a structure, giving you control over how much customer data you expose to other systems. You create and configure a structure using the Structures page in MXO .
What do I need to store, cache and send in each API call?
You need to ensure you include the TID in each API call. The TID is created by MXO when a customer visits a Touchpoint.
What does the API send back to me?
Depending on the context triggered, the API may return instructions to optimize your Touchpoint, displaying new content and data (assets), returned from MXO , to the customer. The returned asset is provided in Base64 encoded format and usually consists of HTML markup, but may also contain JSON or XML data.
The API may also return Track or Capture instructions, but API users can ignore these.
