Bring Your Own Channel (BYOC) lets you integrate a digital
Any channel, contact, or skill associated with Digital Experience. messaging channel that's not supported by CXone. BYOC lets you use CXone APIs to create one or more custom digital points of contact The entry point that an inbound contact uses to initiate an interaction, such as a phone number or email address. and a corresponding digital channel. For the unsupported channel to work with CXone, you must build and host your own middleware software. The middleware acts like a bridge or adapter between the unsupported platform and the Digital Experience platform in CXone. It translates between two potentially incompatible APIs and allows them to communicate back and forth. This communication could be, for example, the agent sending a message to the contact The person interacting with an agent, IVR, or bot in your contact center.. BYOC can support text-based interactions that are inbound, outbound, or both.
The third-party channel you are integrating may have limitations. For example, WhatsApp channels rely on templates that are stored in Meta. A BYOC WhatsApp channel does not have the same authorization that a native Digital Experience WhatsApp channel has to access these templates.
Before configuring the integration, plan how your middleware will function and interact with CXone. You must have the middleware before configuring anything in CXone.
If BYOC doesn't fit your use case for integrating an external chat, you may want to use the web SDK.
The Jungle, a subsidiary of Classics, Inc., wants to set up a new channel for a social media platform called The Watering Hole. The Watering Hole will open a new market for The Jungle, reaching users on the African savanna. It is a recently created platform, and therefore unsupported by CXone. The CTO of the Jungle, Shere Khan, decides to integrate The Watering Hole as a BYOC channel.
Shere Khan works with his engineering lead to diagram the architecture of the integration. They identify all of the necessary API endpoints that The Watering Hole provides, plus all of the Digital Engagement 
endpoints that Digital Experience provides. To facilitate communication between Digital Experience and The Watering Hole, the engineering lead also plans the middleware functionality.
After the engineering team finalizes technical details, Shere Khan sets up a new digital channel in the Digital Experience platform. With his engineering lead, he creates a new BYOC integration, configures permissions for their digital agents, and sets up routing queues The system uses routing queues to determine which agents to route cases to. Your system administrator creates routing queues so that certain cases are routed to agents with expertise in that type of case. for The Watering Hole.
After the engineers finish building and testing the new channel, King Louie and the Marketing department start a new marketing campaign to publicize the new channel. This generates traffic for the digital agents to start responding to posts made on The Watering Hole and direct messages to The Jungle's account.
mTLS Security
You can enable mTLS security for your BYOC channels. This type of security allows both sides of the server communication to be validated—CXone validates the connection with your middleware and your middleware validates the connection with CXone.
Setting up mTLS security entails both your middleware and CXone having certificates installed. You must work with your engineering team to generate the necessary certificates and private keys. After mTLS is enabled for your CXone tenant High-level organizational grouping used to manage technical support, billing, and global settings for your CXone environment, you can enter these values into the BYOC integration settings in the CXone interface.
The following are key facts about implementing mTLS security for BYOC channels:
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Be sure to have these credentials prepared and installed in your middleware before your CXone Account Representative enables mTLS. Once mTLS is enabled, CXone begins checking for certificates. This means you need to enable mTLS and add the necessary credentials at the same time to avoid any failed connections.
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If your private key is password protected, you must enter the password into the BYOC integration settings.
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You can optionally include a certificate authority.
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You can generate your own certificate and key.
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You may want to review the Connectivity Requirements page in the online help to ensure you have the necessary URLs and IPs allowed.
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Be sure you are aware how frequently your client certificate expires.
High Level Setup
Before you can use Bring Your Own Channel (BYOC) functionality, you need to ensure CXone is set up with everything you need. The following list explains the entire setup process at a high level. Follow the links in each step for more details and instructions for that task. Be aware that you will need a member from your engineering or development team to help with many of the steps.
Outbound BYOC using Personal Connection has a separate setup help page.
- Enable at least one user with digital permissions. You can create a new employee with digital engagement or enable an existing employee as a digital agent An agent who handles digital interactions, such as those on email, chat, social, messaging, and SMS channels..
- Create a digital skill for the channel you want to add. This syncs to the routing queues list in Digital Experience.
- Add your digital agent to the digital skill. You can do this from the user profile OR from the skill.
- Have your engineering team build your middleware.
- Create the BYOC integration using details from the middleware.
- Set up the channel. When your engineering team built the middleware, they may have created a user-friendly webpage for this. If not, you can call the Channel API directly.
- Add the BYOC to the routing queue that came from the digital skill you created.