Inbound Communication Matching Overview

In order to assist with the manual process of identifying a customer and associating an automatically created Case to the correct Customer, Location, and Contact that you have in your OvationCXM instance, we use the data we have from the inbound communication in order to match to the correct record.

As part of this matching logic, we refer to what is called an 'ad-hoc' customer. This means that the Customer, Location, and Contact records were created automatically by the system as a placeholder customer rather than specifically by your team (from API, bulk import, or manual creation). We use this ad-hoc flag to lower the ranking of when a match is assigned to help ensure we are attaching the inbound communication to the best possible customer profile.

It's also worth noting that this matching logic is the system default and can be override by your organization's specific matching logic. For example, if you collect a UID as part of your voice IVR, you can use that to lookup and match to exact customer records.

Inbound Email Matching

When someone sends an email to an email inbox that is configured to automatically create Cases, we attempt to match the email to the correct record for you. This works the same way whether your organization uses the IMAP or Forwarding process for creating Cases from inbound emails.

We try to match the email address from the inbound email to the standard Email field on the Contact record.

The logic we use works like this:

1. If the inbound email address matches a single Contact that is on one Location, we attach the automatically created Case to the Customer, Location, and Contact that matched.
2. If the inbound email address matches multiple Contacts or a Contact on more than one Location, we then look at the types of records before selecting a match:
   1. If the email address matches to only one Contact on a non-ad-hoc Location (i.e. intentionally created), we attach the automatically created Case to the Customer, Location, and Contact that was intentionally created.
   2. If the email address matches to more than one Contact on more than one non-ad-hoc created Location, we then look at the matching ad-hoc records before selecting a match:
      1. If the email address matches to multiple Contacts on multiple ad-hoc created Locations, we attach the automatically created Case to the latest created ad-hoc Customer, Location, and Contact. This prevents the system from creating a new ad-hoc record every time that customer emails you.
      2. Otherwise, if the email address matches to Contacts on multiple ad-hoc created Locations and multiple non-ad-hoc created Locations, the system will automatically create a new ad-hoc Customer, Location, and Contact for this Case. The Case can then be manually moved to the correct customer records and the ad-hoc records will automatically be deleted.

Inbound Phone Matching

Matching inbound phone calls to the correct customer records works the same way as email except that the phone number matches to the standard Business phone field on the Location rather than the Email field on the Contact object.

Inbound SMS Matching

Matching inbound SMS messages to the correct customer records works the same way as email except that the SMS number matches to the standard SMS Number field on the Contact rather than the Email field on the Contact object.