Onboarding and Messaging

It would be impossible to try and document every possible way clients might want to integrate with Relay. Relay’s goal is to try and fit as seamlessly as possible into your existing business process; whatever that may be. Therefore, this section is about providing general concepts and ideas to think about when integrating with Relay.

Onboarding

Onboarding a user provides Relay with the necessary information (data) required to build their personalized Feed. At a minimum, Relay requires a first name, mobile phone number, and TCPA SMS consent. However, you have the option to provide additional information to further personalize the user experience. Any time the user’s information is updated, you should re-onboard the user to Relay. Re-onboarding does not remove any of their existing experiences that have already been posted to their Feed. In addition to providing the user data, the onboarding action allows you to provide a Relay trigger ID to post a message to the user’s Feed during the onboarding process. For example, you may want to provide a welcome message.

Messaging

Messaging requires the user to have been previously Onboarded to Relay. If the CCID does not exist within Relay’s system, the Messaging request will fail. Messaging requires a very limited amount of data. The minimum being the user’s CCID and the Message Trigger ID. Messaging will honor the current TCPA SMS consent value stored in Relay. So, if you try and send a Message to a user with Stop consent, Relay will block the SMS from going out.

Onboarding and Messaging

A common question we get asked a lot is “If the Relay Onboarding action supports both adding a new user, updating an existing user and can trigger a Relay message, why do I need to use the Relay Messaging action?”. As it turns out, there are advantages to using both Onboarding and Messaging.

• Onboarding requires lot more information to be provided, and verified by Relay, every time. Depending on where all of the data is stored, this could have a negative impact on your backend system. Although, this all depends on your volume.

• Onboarding requires a TCPA consent value to be passed in each time. Therefore, you need to ensure your consent management is in order so you do not accidentally override a Stop consent.

• Messaging does not pass any consent information and instead honors the current consent value. This means that if I attempt message a user that is at Stop consent, Relay will automatically block the SMS from being sent. If I re-onboard an existing user I am required to pass in the current consent. Therefore, it is important that your consent management system is always up to date.

Using the combination of both Onboarding and Messaging follows the software engineering best practice of separation of concerns.

NOTE

While using a combination of Onboarding and Messaging is a best practice, it is not required. Ultimately, the right answer is the one that works best for your business and business processes.

Common Questions

Do I have to onboard all of my existing users?

• If you are only using the Onboarding action to message users, then the answer would be no.

• If you are using a combination of Onboarding and Messaging, then the answer is more complicated. Because Messaging requires a user to have been previously been onboarded, prior to Messaging, you could do a quick check to see if the user was previously onboarded and if not Onboard them before Messaging. If this is more complicated then you would like then the answer to this question would be yes, you need to onboard all existing users.

How do I onboard all my existing users?

If you determined that you are going to bulk onboard all your existing users you have a couple of options:

• You can create a one-time CSV data extract and then use SFTP to send the file to Relay. This is a very common approach used by the majority of Relay clients.

• You can create a one-time Flow that runs a batch query and calls the Relay onboarding API in batch mode. This can often be an easier task if you don’t already have an SFTP connection with Relay configured. The only concern is to estimate the number of Salesforce callout APIs that will be required to onboard all your users and ensure you do not exceed your daily limit.

Do I have to trigger a Relay message during onboarding?

No, the trigger ID is an optional field. If no trigger ID is provided then only the user information will be updated.

Is there a time I would always want to use Onboarding vs Messaging?

A common place (although not required) where Onboarded is almost always used is in combination with the Relay LWC. As a reminder, the Relay LWC enables your agents to manually trigger messages to user (for example during a support call). The reason you use Onboarding is that, currently, the Relay LWC cannot launch a Flow therefore, it would not be possible to first check if the user was Onboarded. However, even if the LWC is always configured to use Onboarding, you can still use a combination of Onboarding and Messaging in your Flows.