Engage Digital | Intro to communities

Communities are databases of identities associated with each channel. Identities allow agents to post messages to various channels in the platform. Before you create a channel, you must create a community for each type of channel being used.

Once created, a community can be used by several different channels of the same digital or social media type. For more information about how identities are used in the platform, see Managing agent identities.

For example, if you have multiple Facebook accounts, each Facebook channel can use the same community.

Extra value mapping

You can use communities to configure data that will automatically populate the customer record. This feature is called extra value mapping, and allows you to leverage data that may already be present or defined in your business, such as in your social media channels, or customer relationship management application.

This data can include keys that are associated with either a standard or custom field. For information about how agents view customer information in the customer record, see Managing customer information.

For example, for your Apple Business Chat community you decide to collect a customer_id field. You create a Customer Number custom field to hold this data in Digital > Custom Fields. You then map this key to a Customer Number field for your community in Admin > Channels > Community Profiles. Your customer record will then report the data from the customer_id key in your Customer Number field.

For more information about how keys and values are created, read Adding custom fields.

Communities that require an access token

To connect to certain communities such as Twitter or digital communities on the platform, the platform requires you to provide an API access token when creating the community. You may configure API access tokens by selecting Dev Tools > API access tokens in the left-hand navigation bar.