Customer Identification

Introduction

When the customer is browsing your website, the tracking code submits SYSTEM events to the Web Engagement Servers, such as VisitStarted, PageEntered, SignIn, etc. The customer's identification is based on this event flow, in addition to the information retrieved from the Contact Server. For a complete list of SYSTEM events, see Event Resource. Genesys Web Engagement identifies the following states for the browsing customers:

• Authenticated—The customer registered in the website by filling the identification forms and entering identifiers, such as, the e-mail and password, or the account name and password; the tracking code submits the SignIn event with the identifier (used as identityId).
• Recognized—The customer signed out or or did not register, but the website can submit user information with the UserInfo event, which contains the identityId or the visitId.
• WM-Recognized—The website did not recognize the customer, but Genesys Web Engagement assumes the identity of the customer.
• Anonymous—The customer is anonymous.

User's states

Genesys Web Engagement manages the Authenticated and Anonymous states as default states without any customization. For the Recognized and WM-Recognized states, you need to customize with additional rules and you should implement the agent validation for the engagement decisions. These states do not ensure 100% of confidence in the customer information collected, so you should deploy the following strategies for these additional recognized states: 

• Create a non-identified interaction from the user state.
• Create an identified interaction from that state.
• Create an additional type of interaction which enables the agent to make the final decision about the identification.

Mechanism of Visits, Identities, Sessions, Pages, Events

Genesys Web Engagement uses information stored in the SYSTEM event to maintain the customer identification flow and defines the following objects to store customer information in the Backend Server database:

• The visit resource defines a visit started with a specific browser session, and is associated with the flow of pages visited (entered then exited) by the customer; the visit ends when the customer closes the browser, or leaves the monitored site (domain).
• The identity resource defines the information of the authenticated customer.
• The session resource defines the flow of pages visited (entered then exited) for a period where the customer is authenticated.
• The page resource defines a page entered at a given time, that may be exited later; it does not collect all the events related to a given URL.
• The event resource contains the occurrence of a given event at a given time.

The globalVisitID identifies the browser used to navigate the website; this device (mobile phone, computer, or tablet) can be shared among several customers and can be associated with several customers. When the customer starts a visit on the website (a browser session is opened for the website), the Genesys Web Engagement Backend Server creates a Visit resource and records the browsing history related to the visit by creating a page resource for each page entered then exited. All the events are also recorded as a collection of events associated to the visit and the pages.

Anonymous Customer

If the customer is not identified or recognized, no identity is created, but the visit, including pages and events, keeps track of the customer's activity on the website. 

Authenticated Customer

When, during the visit, the customer authenticates on the website, a session is started. The Genesys Web Engagement Backend Server creates a session resource and an identity resource to store the customer information. The identifying information used to register (for instance, the e-mail address) is available in the SignIn event and is used to:

• Create the identityId or search the customer's identity resource;
• Associate the customer with a contact in the Genesys Solution.

GWE SignIn event.png

The SignOut and UserInfo events are used to manage the collections of additional information. These collections, called contacts and useridentifications, are introduced in the Backend Server database in this purpose. 

• The contacts collection maintains the association between the identityIds and the sessionId, visitId, and globalVisitId.
•  The useridentifications collection store all of the SYSTEM events. 

When the customer session ends with a SignOut event, further browsing activity continues to be recorded in the visit resource until the browser is closed by the customer, and the identity state changes to recognized. Note: The customer's identity is not certain; for instance, another member of the family could be browsing with the same device.

Accessing Customer Information

All the customer information, including visits, sessions, pages, identities, and events, is available through the History REST API Reference. This RESTful interface enables you to manage JSON collection of objects using POST and GET HTTP requests. Using filters and paging options, you can easily access to subsets of resources. For instance, to retrieve the the collection of pages associated with a given visit, you can use the following request: http://[server]:[port]/backend/data/visits/<visit_id> For complete and detailed information about writing requests, see the resource access template page.