Scripting For The Grown-Up Cloud Contact Center

March, 2018

This blog includes a shopping list of requirements that is applicable to both on premise and cloud solutions.
We are getting technical again this month, but no apologies – this blog gets to the heart of some key business issues facing all users of contact center systems.

As contact center cloud offerings expand, customers are being given toolsets that allow them to script their cloud contact center behaviour, or so it may seem.

The leading cloud providers have to offer lowest-common-denominator functionality in order to make their cloud offerings simple enough to work at scale.

This creates a landscape where it is very easy to throw together a simple solution for a contact center project, but means that modelling real-world contact center flows using this sort of tool requires a lot of additional integration effort.  Good for the cloud providers who create ‘stickiness’ for their customers by forcing investment in integration, but not so good for contact center operators who need to model detailed business processes for corporate end-users, and do so quickly in order to secure projects and turn a profit.

Scripting requirements for customers, beyond mom and pop shops, is the same whether on premise or in the cloud.  Here is our shopping list of requirements:

  • One application for all workflows; voice, dialog tree for bots, IVR, session routing.
  • Extensibility.  The scripting framework should allow you to build your own re-usable building blocks.
  • Reuse.  Is the framework set up to enable discrete chunks of logic/UI/service interaction script to be packaged for reuse?
  • Easy break out to a programming language (eg Python, JavaScript, C#).  Yes you can produce a text parser to strip out keywords/account numbers using a drag-and-drop visual programming tool; if you have programming talent who can write these things as reusable code you should probably use this rather than build messy scripts.
  • Clean and secure deployment of scripts, library code and dependencies, with versioning.  When you have rich scripting, deployment requires more than sending a script document to the server.  The deploy mechanism needs to do logic checking to catch errors at deploy time instead of run time, and automatic packaging of dependencies to make the process easy.

And of course all of this has to be properly cloud-deployable.  The framework needs to be simple enough so that business level people can get to grips with scripting, but powerful enough to enable complex workflows to be built quickly.

Cloud vendors will seek lockin with their own simple scripting products.  But users with more complex requirements should also consider richer scripting environments, that will integrate with a variety of cloud offerings.

Never been given this advice before?  Not sure about it?  Feel free to drop us a line at info@sytel.com

What We Offer

Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.

Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.

All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.

Flexible Contact Center Software

Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale

  • Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

    CCaaS for subscribers – global service​, with no upfront costs

  • Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners

    Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software

  • Contact Center Platform – Enterprise

    High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid

Blended Media Desktop

Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace

Work Anywhere

Browser-based tools, no software installation required

Customise, Localise, White Label

Design all user interfaces to individual requirements

Integration via APIs

‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps

World Class Development

Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries

Capabilities

Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.

All Media Channels

Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended

Agent Multi-Tasking

Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel

Dynamic Workforce Management

Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels

Predictive Dialing

Best-of-breed performance under compliance

Optimised Inbound Routing

Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service

Agent Scripts

Help agents achieve and maintain excellence

Voice and Screen Recording

See and hear exactly how agents are interacting

Analytics and Data Feeds

Measure and evaluate performance at every level

IVR, Bots & Conversational AI

Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers

Customer Journey Tracking

Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations

Modules

Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance

Softdial One™

Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators

Softdial Scripter™

Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications

Sytel AI Dialer™

Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules

Softdial Pathfinder™

Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection

Softdial Media Server™

Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls

Softdial Reporter™ 5

Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels

Softdial Publisher™

Comprehensive data output to build your own reports

Softdial Recording Monitor™

Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards

Softdial Campaign Manager™

Automation to optimise any outreach strategy

Softdial Repository™

Central storage and configuration of common resources

Sytel Global Compliance™

Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer

Solutions

Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications

By Business Type

Enterprise

A full featured contact center software solution, designed for optimum performance at scale

Small/ Medium Business

Options for SMBs to subscribe to our full-featured cloud service managed and hosted by either one of our partners or by Sytel themselves

By Industry

Customer Service

Connect quickly to well equipped agents

Market Research

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

Debt Collection

Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app

Sales & Telemarketing

Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing

Healthcare

Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care