Enable Third-Party Bots for a Partner Contact Center

As an alternative to setting up Salesforce AI agents and bots, admins can set up third-party bots in Salesforce partner contact centers with Bring Your Own Channel for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). This helps admins use the same partner vendor for backend contact center functionality and bots, while their agents have a familiar experience in Salesforce.

If a third-party bot solves customer problems or requests during a Messaging session, the session isn't escalated to a rep. Alternatively, a customer can request to chat with a rep to escalate the Messaging session. Either way, partners send conversation entries and any message attachments to Salesforce. For Messaging sessions that don't get escalated, this information is useful for tracking metrics and collecting data. For a Messaging session that gets escalated to a rep, previous conversation entries between the customer and the third-party bot appear in the conversation component. These entries help the rep gather context quickly and act on the customer request more efficiently.

To make third-party bots an option for reps helping customers in Messaging sessions, configure your environment to call Interaction Service API endpoints so they ingest historical conversation entries from a partner’s repository into Salesforce.

  1. To create a new conversation, call the Establish Conversation API (POST /api/v1/conversation). Pass in the parameter channelAddressIdentifier and information about the participants.

  2. To send the conversation history and transcript to Salesforce, call the Conversation History API (POST /api/v1/conversationHistory).

    • Pass in the parameters channelAddressIdentifier, conversationParticipants, and conversationEntries.
    • Pass a displayName and participant information for the third-party bot as part of the related ConversationParticipant payload in the Conversation History API request. This information helps to identify the bot in the transcript.
    • To send an attachment with a conversation entry, upload the file to Salesforce with the User Interface API. Then pass the attachment information in the conversationEntries.entryPayload of the Conversation History API request.

    The Conversation History API sends a maximum of five conversation entries for a maximum of three Messaging session participants and associates the entries with a Messaging session record.

    As part of the first call to the Conversation History API, the response includes a Messaging session ID. In case of escalation, use the Messaging session ID to route the conversation to a rep. While routing is in progress, you can continue calling the Conversation History API with the same session ID to complete the upload of transcript to Salesforce. If needed, call the endpoint repeatedly until the full conversation history is sent to Salesforce.

    Upload the transcript in reverse order, first uploading the latest message and then earlier messages. This helps the rep see the latest conversation in case routing happens before the entire transcript is uploaded.

See Also