Contact Expert v7.1 for Skype for Business Server

External Interaction Routing

Overview

External interaction routing expands Contact Expert's agent and interaction pairing capability, therefore developing a better customer service by finding the perfect 'customer-agent' match from the accumulating business data.

CE has a skill-based call distribution system which uses strategies like 'most idle agent' to equalize the agent utilization and ensure that agents with the same skill-set will not spend more or less time in idle state than the others. To achieve this the product considers properties it is aware of, like direction, media type, service levels, skills, etc. However it does not know of any additional business data the customers possess of their clients.

The goal is to analyze business data at routing time to find the most suitable agent for the particular customer and business case.

How does external routing work

This integration is designed to maintain the least possible agent or interaction states within a 3rd party application.

If an interaction can be transmitted, the switch performs the routing logic to define the type of interaction and find the target agents for that specific interaction.

Management of ACD Plugins

Think of the ACD plugin as a "communications gateway" between Contact Expert's ACD Connector Server and the external ACD systems. Each plugin is a DLL; in addition to the services it must provide to communicate with the external ACD system, it also needs to implement another set of methods and events to engage the ACD Connector Server.

The ACD Connector Server communicates with the various CE core components to collect data to be passed towards the external ACD via the ACD Plugin, and to receive the routing decisions from there.

Consequences of using external ACD

Warning

Please note that using an external ACD disables a couple of CE's default ACD features:

  • Emergency queues
  • Priority queues (top, high, medium, low)
  • Agent skill level based routing
  • Routing strategy: Most Idle Agent Routing
  • Routing strategy: Most Recent Agent Routing
  • Predictive dialing (if response delay exceeds 30 ms)

Because of the volatility of business data, an ACD plugin is designed and developed on a per customer basis to cover particular requirements. An ACD Plugin is a 'deployment' level infrastructure resource, therefore only a Deployment level administrator can access it, the default Tenant-level portal users can not.

Setting up ACD Plugins

Deployment Administrators can create new ACD Plugin configurations, and edit or remove existing entries.

  1. Navigate to Infrastructure → External Services → ACD Plugins.
  2. Use the +New ACD Plugin button to create a new entry.

  3. Fill in the details described below.

    Property Notes
    Name A unique name for the new resource.
    Assembly Name The name of the .dll file from the \ACDPlugin folder within the CE install path. This .dll is not deployed by the CE installers, it must be developed according to individual customer specifications and deployed as/when needed.
    Tenants Choose the associated tenant(s).

  4. Click Submit to save changes to the database.

Management of ACD Policies

ACD Policies govern certain aspects of the interaction routing requests and their responses going back and forth between CE and the external ACD.

Note

An ACD Policy must always be associated with an ACD Plugin.

ACD Policies can be assigned to one or more Tenants, or to Skills.

Setting up ACD Policies for Tenants

Administrators can create new ACD Policies, and edit or remove existing entries.

ACD Policies are accessible by Tenant-level Administrators in the default portal user roles.

  1. Navigate to Infrastructure → External services → ACD Policies.
  2. Use the +New ACD Policy to create a new policy entry.

  3. Fill in the details described below.

    Property Notes
    Name A unique name for the new ACD Policy. As a best practice, set it to the name of the related plugin.
    Tenant Choose the associated tenant.
    ACD Plugin Choose the associated plugin with which the policy will be used.
    Request Timeout Contact Expert considers the delay in the external ACD response time above this value to be caused by system or network errors, and switches back to its own ACD.
    External Routing Enabled Check this option to enable external routing for this ACD method.
    Is Tenant Default Check this option to make this external ACD the default one in this tenant. Only one Tenant default ACD Policy can be enabled at a time. If you enable this option for more than one policy, the last one will be the default.

  4. Click Submit to save changes to the database.

Setting up ACD Policies for Skills

ACD Policies can also bebe setup for Skills.

Policies setup for skills have higher priority. If an ACD Policy is assigned to a skill and also to the tenant the skill resides in, the skill assignment will be preferred.

  1. Navigate to Operations → Agents → Skills.
  2. Click on Edit of a preferred skill entry.
  3. Choose a policy from the ACD Policy drop-down list on the General Parameters tab to be associated with the skill.
  4. Click Submit to save the changes to the database.

Cherry Picking ACD

Cherry Picking is an optional work item distribution algorithm. This new method opens up the contents of all inbound queues for all the designated agents, letting them pick the work items deemed the most important based on their own judgement. Work items showing up in queue can also be tagged with priority information fetched from any customer backend system. See more details on the Cherry Picking ACD page.

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