Kustomer platform overview
Last Update: Nov 2024 • Est. Read Time: 5 MINKustomer is a powerful, customer-centric, omnichannel platform that ensures your customers receive quick and in-depth solutions to their inquiries. Kustomer brings together everything you need to serve your customers in one easy-to-use place, and allows you to extend the functionality of Kustomer beyond the web app.
This technical overview will help administrators understand the architectural landscape of our platform and provide insight on how all these parts work together to make Kustomer unique.
In this article
Building blocks of Kustomer
There are four primary building blocks to Kustomer, which come together to form your customer service experience: Conversations, Channels, the Timeline, and Klasses/Objects.
The Kustomer Timeline is at the center of the Kustomer platform, and acts an omnichannel view of all interactions a customer has had with your organization and can include:
messages phone calls, email, chat, SMS, social media, etc.
events unique to an organization such as order history, shipping details, appointments, etc.
and more.
By combining these individual actions across multiple channels together into one place, you get a complete profile of the customer story, the way you want to view them.
Channels are the method used for receiving and sending conversations. That can be phone calls, email, chat, SMS, social media, or whatever other methods your organization uses to communicate with your customers. More options for channels can be added by installing apps from the Kustomer App Directory.
Conversations are messages between your support/sales agents and your customers via any of the supported Channels. Other customer service systems may refer to these as tickets or cases.
Klasses and Objects can capture any interactions your customers have with your company. Every company using Kustomer has a unique set of products and services, which is why we let you define your own custom object schema to match your business. This could be any event that's relevant to your company, like online order history, reservations, and more.
Kustomer data model
The Kustomer platform is built on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern and focuses on keeping the extensibility of your organization in mind.
The Kustomer Data Model is made up of two types of objects, Standard Objects and Custom Objects. Each object type can define additional custom attributes. Objects can relate to each other by defining custom relationships.
Standard Objects are the base set of objects installed on every organization providing applications an extension of the customer-centric data model. The main set of standard objects installed for all organizations include:
- Company
- Customer
- Conversation
- Message
Custom Objects (KObjects) are used to extend the base data model to properly map data associated with their customers and business. For example, if an organization wants to store orders placed by their customers on their website or mobile application, they can define an order Klass (defined below) and start ingesting order events using the API and/or hooks (link).
Schema
Both Standard and Custom Objects rely on various schema definitions for the system to operate. The Kustomer platform includes the following schema types:
- Custom attributes provide a way for organizations to extend both Standard and Custom Objects in the system. Organizations can define new attributes on an object and provide additional metadata about the attribute like a type, custom icon, color, and display name. These attributes are made available across the system in areas like search, reporting, templates, views, and workflows.
- Relationships define the existence of a relationship between two object types in the system. The relationship can be one-to-one (1-1) or one-to-many (1-M). An example of this might be a relationship that explicitly links an order custom object and a shipment custom object.
Note: Multiple Klasses can be created to define a many-to-many (M-M) relationship. - A Klass is a schema for a custom object. This is required for custom objects to exist and includes a collection of custom attributes and relationships that together make up the definition of the object.
For more details on the Kustomer data model, please check out the article Data Model Overview.
View data in your Kustomer platform
The Kustomer platform allows you to fully customize what is visible to agents in the Customer timeline.
Customized views of relevant data can be rendered:
- As an event on the customer timeline in timeline layouts
- In the Insights panel in the "Details" section
- In the Insights panel as a custom Insight card
For more details, see the Customize Object Views article to get started.
The Controller
The Kustomer platform provides mechanisms for organizations to customize the business logic and automate processes, by using business rules and workflows.
A business rule is a common and easy-to-implement automation that automatically performs actions when conversations are created or updated. Business rules allow you to trigger changes based on Company, Customer, Conversation, and Message attributes.
A workflow is a more intensive set of conditions and actions that can be executed based on an event in the system. Conditional logic can be applied to workflows where each successive step can use data from previously collected data in the workflow. This provides rich capabilities for admins to create complex business logic automation that glues applications together and responds to events from an organization's systems.
For more on Kustomer's automation features, check out the Understanding business rules and Workflows overview articles.
Triggers
A trigger is a definition of an event within the system that a Workflow listens for. Events include Standard Object and Custom Object create, update, and delete events as well as custom events triggered from installed applications. Types and examples of triggers include:
- Kustomer triggers - conversation created, message updated, note added, etc.
- Hook triggers - “Contact Us” form posted to a Form Hook
- App triggers - Twilio text message received, Shopify order updated, etc.
- Scheduled triggers - conversation was snoozed 1 week ago
Hooks
A hook is an inbound endpoint in which to trigger an event. There are two main types of hooks: email and web.
- When you create an email hook, an email address will be provided for an organization to use to Cc/Bcc email addresses with structured data in the message body to kick off a workflow.
- A webhook can be used to create forms or links to outbound webhooks of other applications to post data to a Kustomer URL endpoint to kick off a Workflow.
Kustomer apps
A Kustomer app is a package defining the components (Custom Objects, workflows, triggers, etc…), which can be versioned and deployed to extend the functionality of the Kustomer platform to one or more organizations.
Existing integrations like email, SMS, and voice channels, along with the Kustomer workflow triggers and actions, are deployed using apps. Additionally, custom functionality that is private to a specific organization can be packaged and deployed for a single org through an app.
Kustomer develops first-party apps that are managed internally, as well as the Kustomer Apps platform which allows 3rd-party developers to build and deploy integrations on top of the Kustomer platform. See Apps platform developer documentation for more information.
FAQ
Question: Can I use Custom Objects to create orders in our timeline?
Answer: Yes, you can use the API or define a hook, trigger, and Workflows to receive events from your order system and create / update orders within a customer timeline. Read more about creating custom objects from a hook in the help article Create a Custom Object from an external trigger.
Question: Can I show data associated with a customer in my own proprietary admin tool within a card in the sidebar?
Answer: Yes, you can define a custom context card that either calls out to your own rest API or surfaces data from within Kustomer that is being updated through hooks or Workflows.
Question: Can I segment my customers with custom attributes and custom objects like orders?
Answer: Yes, all custom attributes on Standard and Custom objects are indexed by our search engine and exposed in our application for the purposes of segmentation. These searches can be saved and assigned to users / teams to drive proactive customer engagement and inbound support transactions.