Setting the Stage

In most legacy contact centre interaction scenario's there is a heavy element of Identification and Verification (ID&V) required between the interacting parties. Overwhelmingly the onus of obligation to confirm ID is placed up the customer.

Do you ever receive a call from a contact centre, where the dialogue goes something like;

"Hello, this is Acme Bank calling, for security purposes can you please confirm you full name"
     "David Tidwell, what's this about?"
"Thanks, I'll explain why in a moment or two! Can you please confirm the last part of your postcode starting BS16?"
     "1FX"
"Just a couple more questions…."
     "AAAAAAAHHHHGGGG !!!" CLICK – hang up

As a customer, this experience is infuriating! The Call Centre CALLED ME, and now I have to go through 100 hoops; and they are already inconveniencing me right when I need it the least! The natural and easiest reaction for the customer is to simply hang up! I know; because I do it a lot on unsolicited calls made to me from contact centres.

What about scenario's where the customer has asked for a callback? I suggest in these scenario's the customer is EXPECTING the call/contact, but still may have concerns that they are actually talking to their bank. It is incredibly easy for PHISHING to occur even in voice interactions. How? I block my Calling Line Identity, and phone my TARGET consumer pretending to be their bank. I can FREELY challenge this customer for their full name, date of birth, address, zip (postcode), telephone number and even confirmation of account details by simply pretending to be their Bank.  It only requires minor levels of 'professionalism' and a practiced approach to PHISH in voice channels with some success.

Think about how easy this is to do! So, our line of argument for this concept of reversing the role of Identification and Verification is two-fold;

• It should make it easier for the customer to identify and authenticate themselves to the contact centre
• It should make it easier for the contact centre to identify and authenticate themselves to the customer

With Mobile solutions for Customer Service we have a new instrument that may make for an effective instrument to present SECRETS or TOKENS that are used in a variety of use cases for interactions driven by the CUSTOMER or interactions driven by the ENTERPRISE

Using Mobile Applications to present TOKENS or SECRETS to the Customer Services Team

The Anana Mobile Applications Solution for Customer Service now features the capability for the Customer to provide a secret or token as part of their CONTACT Request.  In the use case presented below, our Customer, Dave Tidwell requests a callback from Customer Service 

Step One – Booking the Callback and setting SECRET Token

Start the dedicated Customer Service application on the iPhone and go to the CALLBACK option.

Dave has selected the CREATE CALLBACK option on his Mobile Application.  In doing so he has provided all the appropriate details and has added a SECRET.  In this case that token is "anana". Dave's expectation is that when the Customer Services Representative calls him back that this token will be 'read-back' to him so that he has a tangible confirmation that the organisation is who they are purporting to be.  Dave presses on CREATE button and the callback request; including the appropriate token is transmitted to the Contact Centre. In this case, we transmit this information into Genesys 8.1 through the Genesys Mobile Solution and Anana's Composite and Atomic Services Solution for Mobile. (A RESTful interaction stack; more on this later!)

Step Two – Confirming CallBack Request is Active

Dave now confirms on his listed CallBacks that the callback is booked.

Step 3 – Confirming details of Callback

Dave has the choice to click on the scheduled Callback item and see the details (we could of course add lots of options for rescheduling, cancellation, changing tokens or means of callback from Voice, to SMS, to eMail to Twitter, to Facebook and so on)

You can see in the graphic above that we have APPENDED the SECRET TOKEN to the Subject of the CALLBACK.  It doesn't have to go here; but it makes presentation for the Customer Services interface in the Genesys Interaction Workspace slighly more intuitive.

Dave goes back to his HOME SCREEN in the Application and can see his pending CALLBACK request.  We can send NOTIFICATIONS in email, or directly to the Application to confirm 5WH (Who, What, Why, When and Where) so that Dave is kept up to date with the STATUS of his interaction request in real-time.

Step Four – Callback active and pending (The work item is being targetted in the Contact Centre)

Step five – Targetting a Customer Services Team Member to conduct the Callback

Meanwhile, depending on the business logic in the underlying routing strategy (either in Genesys Orchestration Server – ORS) in SC-XML or via alternatives such as the automation of injection into Outbound Contact Server (OCS) an agent is targetted based on the NATURE of the enquiry, customer segment, context and state of conversation (via Genesys Rules Engine – GRE), Context Server and Conversation Management and a ringing event occurs in the Contact Centre.

The screengrab above shows that we have configured our Genesys Contact Centre system to RING with a TOAST popup event for this media type.  The Customer Services Representative can see immediately that this is a CallBack interaction, from a Customer called Dave Tidwell, with a Subject of "Help" and the associated TOKEN or SECRET of "anana".  A quick click on "Accept" spawns the interaction proper on the Genesys Desktop in Interaction Workspace.  The agent will of course confirm the Contact Details and importantly the Interaction History to support context and the overall Customer Journey and Customer Experience.

Step Six – Customer Services conducts the Customer Requested Callback

Again, we present this key or token as attached data, and show it clearly in the associated interaction CASE INFORMATION.

Step Seven – the Customer Interaction Dialogue

"Hi Dave, this is John at the ABC Company calling you back as requested.  Your secret is "ANANA", how may I help you?" says the Customer Services Representative
     "Okay, Hi John, thanks for calling back, I have a question about my….." says our customer

Conclusion

The subtle injection of interaction TOKENS, KEYS or SECRETS can help both parties in the conversation.  It adds an additional layer of explicit security with is tangible, is dynamic, and may be easily injected by either party.  The Mobile device is the instrument that allows for the customer injection of ATTACHED DATA and context that "changes the conversation" and helps both parties enjoy a healthier, faster and more effective conversation.

Other Idea's that immediately come to mind

PCI Compliance

Payment Card Industry Compliance – when a customer needs to make a payment via the Customer Services Representative, for example, to pay a current bill, the Customer may easily do so privately on their own Application and on their own Device.  We can transport the attached data for AUTHENTICATION, Transaction ID and Verification Code via the application layer back to the contact centre.  At NO TIME does the CSR see, interact with or request the Credit Card Number, CVV – Card Verification Value or CVV2 (Card Verification Value Code).

Customer Alerting with TOKENS

The Enterprise needs to reach the customer.  In most environments today this is accomplished via OUTBOUND campaigns (dialers) against distinct groups of customer service agents that may even be external to the Enterprise (offshore or otherwise outsourced).  It may be far more effective for this requirement to reach the customer to be handled slightly less confrontationally and to improve the customer experience by sending a NOTIFICATION to the Customer Services Application indicating that the company needs to speak to the customer about their latest bill.  The customer can then acknowledge this request by suggesting the date, time, media and context of that planned conversation.  The results of the application level negotiation for the conversation may be easily pumped into Workforce Management and Schedules to that it is effective for both the contact centre and the customer.  Tokens may be used in this use-case in a similar way.

"Hello Dave, this is John at the ABC Company. Your secret is"anana". Thanks for making time to talk to us" Says John in the Contact Centre
     "Hi John, no problem, it was handy being able to tell you when I'd be free! What seems to be the problem? Why do you need to talk to me?" says Dave our Customer
"Dave, we noticed that your last payment didn't go through……" and so on

Dynamic Use of existing SMART Tokens for AUTHENTICATION mid-interactions

It is easily possible to transport the results of a smart TOKEN via the Application into these scenario's too.  Where Banks issue their customers with smart-fobs that allocate digit based authentication tokens these may be included in the application to provide short lifecycle authentication for high value transactions.  A Customer Service Representive may be able to ask the customer to enter their smart-pin in mid transaction for high risk transactions, for example;

"Yes, Dave, I can help you do the balance transfer. Because its over £1000 can you please activate our BANK Smart PIN and enter the digits in the mobile application now?"
     "Yes, no problem" Says Dave as he enters the 6 digits into his dedicated Banking Application
[We send this key via the application to the Bank Back end systems, and provide a validation token to the Agent and we update the Interaction Workspace Data to show this new state]
"Great, thanks for confirming that for me Dave, so you wanted to transfer £5000 from Savings to your Current Account?"

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.