Objective
Twilio Flex provides robust ways to represent your team, allowing you to tailor how agents appear to customers during Webchat interactions. By leveraging attributes from your Identity Provider (IdP), you can ensure that the names displayed in the Flex UI and Webchat windows align with your company's privacy standards and your agents' personal preferences.
Adding or modifying these attributes in your SSO configuration helps business leaders maintain agent anonymity where necessary and empowers agents to use names they feel most comfortable with.
Product
Flex
Understanding Identity Attributes in Flex
When setting up Single Sign-On (SSO) for Flex, Twilio looks for specific SAML2 Attribute statements to define how an agent is identified both internally and externally.
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full_name(Internal Identity): This is the primary attribute Twilio looks for by default. It is used for internal records, Supervisor views, and Flex Insights reporting.
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public_identity(External Persona): This is an optional attribute used specifically for customer-facing interactions. When provided, Flex will prioritize this value for webchat, allowing the agent's real name to remain private in the chat window while staying accurate in internal reports.
How to Manage Agent Identities and Personas
There are two primary methods to control how an agent’s name appears within the Flex ecosystem. You can either update the source data for the global full_name attribute or implement a public_identity attribute to create a customer-facing persona while preserving the agent's real name for internal reporting.
Method 1: Updating User Profile Attributes
If your SSO is configured to join standard profile fields, you can simply change the values within the user's IdP profile.
For example, if your full_name attribute is defined using a concatenation logic like: String.join(" ", user.firstName, user.lastName)
You can change the agent's display name by editing the First Name or Last Name fields directly in their Okta profile.
Method 2: Modify the attribute statement mapping
In most cases, you wouldn't want to change the name of the agent altogether, but instead use a pseudonym (a nickname or a generic "Agent" title) when interacting on chats with customers while preserving the real name of the agent for internal reports. To accomplish this, you can create a new attribute called public_identity within your SSO application settings.
Instead of changing the user's full_name, you can update the public_identity and map it to other standard user fields like:
user.displayNameuser.nickName- A static string for specific groups.
When the public_identity attribute is provided, its value will be used by Flex for any public interactions.
Why This Matters
Customizing display names is a critical feature for many organizations for two main reasons:
- Privacy and Security: Many companies prefer to partially or fully conceal the real names of their agents to protect their identity during customer interactions.
- Agent Experience: It allows agents to use preferred names or nicknames, fostering a more inclusive and comfortable work environment.