Today's customer can interact with your business across multiple channels, applications, and devices. Often, a customer interaction involves multiple touch points across various solutions, with interaction data in multiple applications. This makes it difficult for stakeholders to understand an aggregation of the customers’ experiences and behaviors.
Acoustic Exchange is an integration framework that allows different offerings to exchange data seamlessly so that businesses can understand their customer's behaviors across multiple applications and channels.
Exchange works on a publish and subscribe model. Publishers register and send event data to Exchange, and the destination endpoints (known as subscribers) register and receive the event data and present it in their own format. Each product that is registered in Exchange has their own presentation layer.
With Exchange, you can share customer event data between Exchange-enabled products, including Tealeaf for a broader and deeper understanding of your customer's experiences and behaviors.
Presently, Tealeaf acts only as a publisher of event data. For example, as a publisher in the Exchange ecosystem, Tealeaf might capture data from a cart abandonment event and then publish that data. A subscriber application in the Exchange ecosystem (Journey Analytics for example) captures and presents data from the cart abandonment event in their own model and framework.
Key terminology
To better understand how Tealeaf works with Acoustic Exchange, you need to know the following terms:
- Endpoint
- In Exchange, an endpoint is a representation of a business solution that provides or receives data through Exchange.
Solutions and applications that are created and supported by Acoustic or approved Acoustic Business Partners can be registered as Exchange endpoints.
- Event
- In Exchange, an event is a specific interaction or behavior that a business application can detect at a specific time and that can be associated with a customer identifier.
Events published to Exchange must conform to a taxonomy. Exchange supports a diverse taxonomy of event types.
The taxonomy is organized around several categories. Each category contains several related event types.
- Syndication
- In Exchange, syndication refers to the entire sequence of actions that occur between endpoints that provide marketing data through Exchange and the endpoints that receive marketing data from Exchange.
- Identifiers
- Identifiers are attributes that identify a specific individual. When an Exchange partner integrates its product with Exchange, it declares which event and audience attributes that it intends to use as identifiers. Each identifier definition specifies a name, a value, and a type.
Exchange partner products are free to assign any name to an identifier. The value is determined during the event. Exchange uses the identifier type to correlate identifiers it finds in the event traffic. The identifier type must conform to one of the pre-defined types that Exchange supports.
You can specify custom identifiers within Tealeaf using step attributes.
Responsibility by user role for integration
Integrating Tealeaf with Acoustic Exchange spans multiple user roles as described here.
- SupportUser or Sysadmin role
Responsibility: Creates the Tealeaf application on Exchange and selects the Event types.
The SupportUser or Sysadmin works with the Administrator to know which supported Tealeaf Events to select.
Exchange includes an interactive guide that is called the Dynamic Event Library. The Acoustic Exchange Dynamic Event Library lists and defines the taxonomy for all Event types that are supported by Acoustic Exchange, including Tealeaf Events.
- Administrator role
Responsibility: Registers the endpoint for Tealeaf in Acoustic Exchange.
The endpoint registration sets the deployment details (such as which Tealeaf data center to connect to) and generates an Acoustic Exchange authentication key.
The authentication key serves as the security token, which allows Tealeaf to publish event data to Exchange.
The authentication key is added to the Exchange auth key field on the Company Settings page automatically, or manually, depending on options selected in Exchange.- The direct connect option generates, activates, and adds the authentication key to the Exchange auth key parameter on the Tealeaf Company Settings page.
- The instructions only option generates the authentication key in a "pending" state.
You can copy and paste the key into the auth key parameter on the Tealeaf Company Settings page.
For information about registering endpoints in Exchange, see the Acoustic Exchange help center.
- Regular user, or any role with access to the Event Manager.
Responsibility: Create Exchange events with the Event Manager.
There are two ways to create Exchange events with the Event Manager:
- Use the Exchange event section to select and configure from a set of ready-to-use Exchange events.
- Add your own Exchange events to the Advanced mode window. See Publishing event data from Tealeaf to Acoustic Exchange for details.
The Event page in the Event Manager includes an Exchange event section.
If you want to publish event data from the set of pre-configured out of the box Tealeaf events to Acoustic Exchange, the Exchange event section needs to be configured for the selected event.
The Acoustic Exchange supported categories and event types for Tealeaf are listed in the Category and Event drop-down lists on the Event page. The categories, events, and associated attributes map to the Event taxonomy used by Exchange. Having access to the Exchange Dynamic Event Library can help you understand how to set the attributes and conditions for the Event.
Once all of these steps are complete, and the defined Event conditions are met during visitor sessions, Tealeaf publishes the Event data to Acoustic Exchange.
Subscribers to the Tealeaf application in Acoustic Exchange capture the Event data and display it in their application, by using their own framework.
If more Exchange events are created later in Tealeaf, the sysadmin or support user can go to the endpoint in Acoustic Exchange and subscribe to the newly created Events.
- SupportUser or Sysadmin role