What is a Custom Attribute?
A Custom Attribute is a custom data field that can be set on the customer profile via one of 3 ways:
- Via a Lookup Adaptor (whether home-grown or an out-of-the-box Gladly integration)
- Via the Create Customer or Update Customer Gladly REST APIs
- Via a custom attribute field set to “editable” that Agents can manually enter freeform text into
Examples of Custom Attributes range from customer tier (e.g.: VIP) to lifetime value (e.g.: $100,000.00).
What can Custom Attributes be utilized for?
In addition to supplying an Agent with more information regarding the Customer they are assisting, Custom Attributes can be used both for routing and for People Match. For example:
- Routing: A Custom Attribute can be used to direct a customer to a certain Inbox of specialists.
- People Match: A Custom Attribute can be used to boost likelihood to match with a skilled specialist or to boost the priority of a Conversation.
It is important to understand these differences:
- Routing: For Custom Attribute routing to work as expected, the attribute must already exist and be set to the correct value in the Customer Profile prior to Rules being evaluated. That is, Gladly will not wait for the Lookup Adaptor to return back the latest custom attribute values before evaluating for routing.
- People Match: Gladly will wait for your Lookup Adaptor to finish sending back more information about the Customer Profile before applying a People Match boost.
Recommendations
Recommendations on how to implement are dependent on your use case and how often your custom attribute changes.
Note that there are a number of out of the box Rule capabilities that you can utilize in Gladly without needing Custom Attributes!
| Attributes change often | Attributes don’t change often. | |
| Required for routing | Use the Create Customer or Update Customer Gladly REST APIs to seed Gladly with the latest attribute data. Consider implementing this only for verified customers in your system vs all profiles so that you’re only updating/creating profiles that are likely to contact you. | Implement lookup adaptor Note that the first time a profile is created on Gladly and when an existing attribute value on a Customer Profile changes for the first time, routing may not go to the correct inbox as rules don’t wait for the lookup adaptor to finish running prior to executing. |
| Required for boosting priority | Implement lookup adaptor. | Implement lookup adaptor. |
