Features and Enhancements

Softdial Contact Center™ V10.7 is aimed at customers who need to add packet media communication options to their contact center, such as email, chat and SMS, in a unified contact center solution.


Description Softdial Repository™ is a replacement for the Namespace Web Console, and is a special database that holds details about agents, composition of queues, tenant details, sound resources, call outcome codes, time zones, campaign names, break reasons and team names. Many other components of the Softdial Contact Center™ system rely on Softdial Repository for information.

Currently, supervisors need to access the configuration server for setting up/ amending agent details, and the campaign manager for setting up/ amending campaigns. The new single web user interface will be an intuitive, simple to use, elegant interface that combines the functions of both the configuration server and the campaign manager.
Benefits
  • Single interface providing functionality for setting up and amending agents and campaigns
  • Improved layout of interface making it simple for supervisors to use; setting up agents and managing their day-to-day operations

Description Within the User Endpoint (agent) definition in the Softdial Repository™, an endpoint can be included within a group or several groups.

Groups enable organizational structures to be followed. For example, Endpoint 24 could be a member of the Billing Group and also a member of the London Group. Likewise, both the Billing Group and the London Group could be members of the Finance Group.

See the Groups section of Terminology from V10.7, and Groups and Queues .
Benefits Supervisors can quickly and easily assign groups to campaigns and queues as work demands dictate, replacing the need to identify agent endpoints individually and re-assign manually

Description All communication types (e.g. a voice call, a chat instance, an email, an SMS text or a video communication) are sessions within Softdial Contact Center™.

Prior to V10.7, sessions had to be de-queued to an IVR agent. With V10.7, we are providing additional in-queue behaviour management.

Messages can be played to sessions in voice queues, inviting a response. For example, “If you would like a callback, please key in time”. As before, subject to IVR and message interruption, sessions can be moved between queues dynamically.
Benefits
  • New facility is particularly aimed at inbound queues, where it has a vital role in improving the customer experience
  • Enables accurate service level tracking as calls stay in queue

Description Softdial Contact Center™ lends itself to multimedia blending naturally. The blending algorithm within Softdial Contact Center™ is as effective dealing with the long service level timescales typical with non-voice or video media as it is dealing with short service levels for voice.

For example, a multi-session chat agent handling 4 different chats could feasibly have all 4 chats on different campaigns for different customers, and have the 4 chat sessions blend independently. This is ideal for some customers who demand high flexibility. However, other customers may want to lock their agents into only working on one project at a time, for either operational or accounting reasons.

When setting up an agent, supervisors may decide to allow an agent complete freedom within the context of the agent’s skill-set or may elect to force the agent to only work on one project at a time for all of their media sessions.

Softdial Contact Center™ takes account of such preferences when making decisions on blending.
Benefits Ability to quickly move agents to handle changing workloads and change the type of sessions and number of sessions that can be delivered to agents.

For example, an agent who had been working on chat only dealing with foot passenger bookings could have the sessions types extended and subject matter increased to handle both chat and email media dealing with foot passenger bookings and vehicle bookings

Description Softdial Scripter™ can not only be used for both human agents’ and virtual agents’ interactions. With V10.7, It can now handle end customers’ interactions. And these interactions are increasingly taking place on smartphones and tablets.

End customers not only demand such interactions but expect the applications on these devices to effectively give them a window on the world. Or, in the case of a company they wish to contact, the ability to contact them in any way and access any content dynamically.
Benefits
  • Total flexibility; any operating system, any browser, any device
  • Continued development of device specific libraries of controls
  • User interface template libraries offered for different customer devices, which allows rapid development of self-service apps for mobile and tablet

Version 10.7 sees a complete overhaul of the HTTP APIs. Even though many of the APIs are real-time they need to be exposed in a manner that suits the partner’s integration needs and network topology.

As part of the initial 10.7 release, the core Softdial CallGem™ and Softdial Campaign Manager™ APIs will be exposed by a web service (CallGem HTTP Proxy) that supports 2 distinct ways of working with the API:

  1. Callback
    This mechanism allows server-to-server communication via HTTP callbacks. It allows full-duplex messaging and is typically used for a server-side integration where the remote server is either on the same network segment or connected through a VPN.
  2. Long polling
    This mechanism allows server-to-server communication via long polling for events originating from Softdial Contact Center™ core services. It allows server-to-server integration over a wide area network without VPN use. This kind of mechanism would normally be used with HTTPS.

The CallGem HTTP Proxy is a high performance component and is (almost) stateless, only maintaining session authentication information. It is also designed to multiplex and inter operate with a web server cluster, which provides 2 very useful benefits:

  1. The ability to scale client connections to a maximum of 64,000.
  2. The ability to run multiple instances of Softdial CallGem™ and have them present to the outside world as a single service. This allows a single Softdial Contact Center™ platform instance to scale to match the number of client connections we can support.

For more details, see The HTTP API.


Description Customers will be able to write their own steps if required using .NET (if the customer has installed Microsoft development tools) or Python which is supplied as standard.
Benefits
  • All functions and libraries can be amended and/ or replaced as required
  • Different languages accommodated depending on customer choice
  • Demo scripts include library functions providing clear examples
  • Scripts written by customers will help to push sessions to the correct agents more quickly, saving time and improving customer service

Description V10.7 introduces an agent desktop function that provides agents with all the information required in an intuitive layout. Initial examples of typical agent desktop profiles will be provided e.g. an agent who works exclusively on chat.

These profiles can be used as examples for supervisors to quickly familiarize themselves with so they can easily create an agent profile configuration and add new agents to the system.
Benefits
  • Customers can get up and running quickly using the example profiles supplied
  • Full flexibility, profiles can be amended and new profiles added
  • Each tenant could have different profiles setup, with supervisors in each tenant being able to choose from a list of predefined profiles

Description Softdial Contact Center™ already provides load balancing based on service levels with voice sessions being measured in seconds. Softdial Contact Center™ also now enables different service levels for other media types to be used for example, seconds on voice and minutes on chat. And this means that any media types can be blended to help manage service levels across a range of contact center services.
Benefits Meets the business goal of being able to seamlessly and automatically reallocate all and any agents across all queues in order to balance service levels across the contact center

Description The new reporting service, Softdial Reporter™ 5 , provides clear visuals of all the different information feeds; agent status and performance, queues, campaigns etc. The Softdial Reporter™ 5 screen is populated with widgets which can be easily added and removed.
Benefits
  • Full flexibility of desktop view and layout including ability to change the user interface theme
  • Multiple data feeds, all with visual reports available
  • Initial release of V10.7 version will include inbound and outbound voice reporting

Description Agents logging in to Softdial Contact Center™ will be able to do so seamlessly, as their login credentials for Softdial Contact Center™ will be the same as those used for Microsoft Active Directory. All the agent has to do is log on to their Windows PC to authenticate with Softdial Contact Center™. This function is suitable for agents both on-site and those working remotely.
Benefits
  • Easier and quicker for agents to log in
  • Reduces admin work for supervisors, only one set of credentials to be maintained
  • Also suitable for remote users

For more details, see Single Sign On.


Description Agents’ call recordings can be augmented with a recording of their screen activity while the voice conversation was taking place. The screen actions made and data entered is recorded as a video recording e.g. mouse movement and information typed.

The video is compressed and stored as an mpeg4 file together with the associated voice element of the call in a zip file. All recorded files are stored server side with easy access for playback and review as required.
Benefits
  • Ability to review complete historic conversations including the agents’ screen activities, enabling improved agent training and investigation relating to customer queries and complaints
  • High level of compression of video combined with minimal frames per second recording requires minimal storage capacity

For more details, see Desktop Capture.