Anana has started work on a custom extension to the Genesys Interaction Workspace that will make it easier for Customer Services Representatives working with multiple screens and interactions to manage their screen estate. In current shipping versions of the Genesys Interaction Workspace all open interactions are docked into the footer of the main Interaction Workspace display. This is only visible if the Interaction Workspace has FOCUS. It completely disappears too when using the Interaction Workspace in Widget (minimised) Mode.

Anana’s Dockable Interaction Toolbar for Genesyslab will create a separate dockable/undockable interaction toolbar that may be freely positioned anywhere on the screen. Whilst the underlying interactions may be behind several CRM (Customer Relationship Management) screens or other back-office system screens it will be possible at a glance to see which interactions are open, and which one has the latest update from a customer in it. This will be particularly useful in any solution where the “Capacity Rules” allow more than a single interaction at a time on the desktop. This is typical for web-chat, eMail and SMS channels in the eServices capability of Genesys. The customer intra-prompt response times are slow enough for a single agent to handle 3 or more interactions at time concurrently.

With higher capacity rules on a per-media basis it is clear that a simpler and more effective means is required to draw the CSR’s attention to the latest interaction, so that with a single click FOCUS may be drawn to the relevant underlying customer interaction.

We will post some screenshots of Anana Custom Dockable Toolbar for Genesys Interaction Workspace in the very near future.

Anana is really proud to have delivered 3 of the most prominent Genesys eServices Social Media enabled contact centre solutions anywhere in the European and African region over the last year or so. These include T-Mobile, Orange and Vodacom. We are also working on several others concurrently which are not quite ready for public attention! (More on these later!).

A very early requirement in these initial shipping releases was the ability of the customer services representative to originate new interactions to the customer over social media channels without requiring an existing OPEN interaction to respond against.

Anana’s first deliverable was a functional extension for Twitter Originate for Genesyslab 8.1 version on the Genesys Agent Desktop. This was then rewritten and rebuilt as a custom module for Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.xxx as described in video demo here in an earlier post.

We are now working quickly on another custom module for the Genesys Interaction Workspace 8.1 or higher releases that see’s the same underlying functionality and capability being extended to Facebook. This will allow the Customer Services Representative to create a new POST on the WALL or to add a new parent COMMENT to an existing topic thread in the absence of a parent interaction from an existing customer.

Whilst working quickly to realise these new functional capabilities within Genesys Social Engagement and the Social Messaging Server we work closely with Genesys Product Management and Engineering to effect the disclosure of the features and functions created so that they may be returned to the generic mainstream shipping products over time.

Due to the nature of some of our recently won Genesys based Contact Centre solutions which feature the Genesys Interaction Workspace we are working on a new Robot that will help our clients load and performance test their IWS based agent desktops. Our automation robot will simplify the end-to-end performance and functional testing of IWS based on two deployment models. The first is the testing of the Genesys Interaction Workspace when delivered by Xenapp (Citrix) remotely from an upstream (typically in the Cloud) server and the other for Genesys Interaction Workspace solutions deployed on the customer premises (CPE). The robot, whilst still in planning will be able to load test, execute scripts and gather appropriate performance and behavioural metrics.

Anana already has a broad range of SIP-P based script engines which we use to load test the performance and capability of IP based (SIP based) telephony infrastructures for Customer Services.

Watch this space for more information!

Tweet Originate is a custom Anana development for Genesyslab Interaction Workspace 8.1.200.16 on Genesys 8.1 with Social Messaging Server. It is a functional addition to the main shipping capabilities of Twitter as a media type for Social Media Customer Service. It allows Customer Services Representatives to conduct 3 typical additional functions in the following typical use cases;

1 – It allows the CSR to post an outbound tweet to the underlying Brand Twitter Account that doesn’t specifically target an individual customer
2 – It allows the CSR to initiate an outbound tweet to a new customer which has not yet interacted with Customer Services on the inbound side
3 – It allows the CSR to initiate an outbound tweet to a known existing customer

Use Case One
We have found our existing Genesys based customer deployments of Twitter required the ability for the Customer Services team to send a “Good Morning” or end of the shift tweet to their followers. Another use case could be a tweet to the timeline that recognises an event that touches a significant number of followers; for example, an Operating System Update available for their phones; or an outage or similar regional or national event.

Use Case Two
Could be triggered by a scenario where someone in another part of the business is very keen that someone in Customer Services reaches out to a customer who is talking about the Brand; but not directly at them. This form of escalation is quite common; where Customer Services may get an urgent request from Marketing or the Brand team to reach out to a Customer and offer assistance. “Could you please get one of the Customer Services team to reach out to Dave Tidwell @dave_t_pilot and assist him with the problem on his iPhone?”. In this case Dave may have been complaining bitterly about the device and/or the brand but not mentioned the brand directly. This is common too where your Genesys deployment is configured to pick up MENTIONS and Direct Messages but not to listen for keywords.

Use Case Three
Is typically triggered by a customer who might say “Okay, when you’ve got the answer from engineering can you please tweet me with the update?” The time lag between the original interaction and the subsequent response from the back-office could be minutes, hours, days or even weeks. Without Tweet Originate it is impossible for the agent to initiate a response to the customer as the previous interaction will have been closed.

The following video explores these 3 use cases in detail, completely narrated and described step by step.

All of the custom features included in this module are designed to fully harmonise and replicate usage of the Interaction Workspace by Agents on the inbound side. Some are subtle; for example, the lookup of the target customers KLOUT social influence score when the outbound tweet is initiated. This activity is conducted asynchronously so that a failure of score to return from KLOUT will not prevent the agent from doing the response; and will appear after the interaction has already been started. You’ll notice that perhaps in the video.

A significant element of any contact centre solution are “Statistics” and a varied range of tools for providing real-time, near real-time as well as historic reports. These are obviously designed with their core focus on helping the operational contact centre manage the delivery of ‘resources’ versus their customers ‘demand’.

The 3 main statistical elements delivered in typical contact centres are;

• The Wall Board – a place for real-time as well as near real time statistics – the performance of the contact centre versus current or near real-time demand
• The Supervisors desktop – a place for the team leader and supervisors to manage their teams adherence to Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators
• The Business Analysts – for historic reporting, business intelligence and analytics

We see these 3 mainstays being supported by new features in Genesys Interaction Workspace for example, that expose additional layers of statistics to each agent. These include;

• A statistics Widget – where key metrics can be published or even ‘pinned’ by the customer service representative
• A My Statistics TAB in their desktop application that shows how the team, or the entire Contact Centre is peforming (much like the historic wall board, but now they can be skill specific)
• A holistic Call Centre statistical view that expresses the performance of the contact centre as a whole

So, I’d argue, every single facet of the modern contact centre has lots of information about how how demand is being met by the resources available.  A new concept I’d like to discuss here is the concept of reversing the statistical role so that they can be used by customer to make decisions in real-time.  For example;

• Are there resources available to help me right now?
• If so, how can I reach that pool of resources?
• If there’s a delay, how long is it?
• Do I have alternative options?

In the Anana Mobile Application for Customer Service, which we based on the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform we have modelled the simple presentation of currently available agents by skill.  Study the picture carefully for a moment…

Which channel or media type would you pick?

Scenario A – You are in a rush, and your need to engage with customer services is very high priority. Which Channel would you pick?

Scenario B – You are less hurried, and have an important matter to engage about, but it could wait if it needed to.  Which Channel would you pick?

Scenario C – You have all the time in the world, and the matter to engage about is less than important. Which Channel would you pick?

I think the answers to these options could actually be quite profound.

In Scenario A I may opt for the phone, simply because in a rush, whilst running about with my mobile phone, I can actually talk and walk at the same time. I might not decide to phone though if I can NO agents available to help me.  This brings in all sorts of additional options, like “Publishing expected WAIT times”.

In Scenario B I would probably choose web-chat.  Why? Because I can type pretty fast and I can see that there are more Agents available there

In Scenario C I would probably pick the channel that is most convenient to my situation/device; but only if there were people there to help.  Even though I don’t mind waiting; once I’ve know what available I may start to take more notice of it.  I’d probably still choose to use email, or ask for a call-back.  If I was on Twitter or Facebook I may use those.  SMS may work too as there’s a lot of people available to help me!