Vonage Contact Center omni-channel solution

What is Vonage Contact Center's Omni-Channel Solution?

Using Vonage Contact Center's omni-channel solution, agents can work on work items - cases, chats, leads, and so on - that have arrived through Salesforce and on phone calls received through Vonage Contact Center (VCC).

To be able to use VCC's omni-channel features, you must have integrated VCC into Salesforce and correctly configured the Salesforce Omni-Channel feature. For information about configuring Salesforce Omni-Channel, see Salesforce help. In addition, VCC's omni-channel solution must be enabled for your VCC account.

You can then configure omni-channel for VCC in two different ways:

Integration with Salesforce Omni-Channel presence.
Integration with Salesforce external routing.

Interactions in Salesforce and VCC

Interaction types

Live
An interaction that, by default, requires an agent's full attention. Live interactions include phone calls. If enabled for your account, you can configure the capacity for a live interaction to a lower value, so that agents can simultaneously work on semi-live or non-live interactions.
Semi-live
An interaction that is live with a customer but does not require an agent's full attention. Semi-live interactions include web chats, for example, Live Agent chats.
Non-live
An interaction that is not live and does not require an agent's full attention. Non-live interactions include emails, and Salesforce cases, leads, and custom objects.

VCC makes different routing decisions based on the interaction type. Agents can perform different tasks on an interaction based on its type.

Salesforce objects, work items, and interactions

Salesforce uses different terminology for the items known in VCC as interactions:

Salesforce object
A Salesforce object allows you to store information in your Salesforce organization. The object is the overall definition of the type of information you are storing.
Salesforce record
A record in Salesforce is a specific definition of a Salesforce object. A record contains data in fields as required by the object type.
Work items
A work item is a Salesforce record that Salesforce can route to agents or a third-party. When Salesforce routes the work item to VCC, the work item becomes what is known in VCC as an interaction.

The Salesforce record may be a web chat or a case that arrive in Salesforce through Live Agent or email respectively. Defining a service channel in Salesforce for a Salesforce object enables Salesforce to route records of that type and makes such records into work items.

Integration with Salesforce Omni-Channel presence

Availability

Salesforce Omni-Channel presence integration is available in both Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning Experience.

When you have configured Salesforce Omni-Channel, both Salesforce and VCC can route work to your agents at the same time. Salesforce Omni-Channel routes work items - cases, chats, and so on - to agents using routing settings configured in Salesforce, while VCC routes phone calls to agents using configured interaction plans. Because the two systems route different types of interactions independently, VCC may route interactions to agents who are already busy in Salesforce; Salesforce may route work items to agents who are already busy in VCC. This situation causes a problem for the agent in knowing how to prioritize their incoming work.

To deal with such conflicts, if enabled for your account, you can use Salesforce Omni-Channel presence integration. With Salesforce Omni-Channel presence integration, you can create mappings between VCC's major states and Salesforce's presence statuses so each system knows the status of the agent in the other. If the agent is busy in VCC, the agent appears busy in Salesforce. The converse is also true.

For information about configuring Salesforce Omni-Channel presence integration, see Integrating with Salesforce Omni-Channel presence.

When you create your mappings, you can configure the following events:

When the agent changes their state in ContactPad, their presence status updates in the Salesforce Omni-Channel widget.
When the agent changes their presence status in their Omni-Channel widget, their state updates in ContactPad.
When the agent logs in to ContactPad, the agent goes into an online presence status in the Salesforce Omni-Channel widget.
When the agent logs out of ContactPad, the agent goes offline in the Salesforce Omni-Channel widget.
When the agent goes offline in Salesforce Omni-Channel, the agent logs out of ContactPad.

Auto-acceptance behaviors

When Salesforce assigns a chat to an agent, and auto-acceptance is enabled, the agent's state in ContactPad automatically changes to Busy Inbound. If auto-acceptance is not enabled, the chat shows as Alerting in ContactPad until the agent accepts it in the Omni-Channel widget. You can optionally configure changing the agent's state in ContactPad to Busy Inbound whenever the agent's presence status in the Omni-Channel widget is updated to a busy status. For more information, see Integrating with Salesforce Omni-Channel presence.

Revert to status before interaction (inbound only)

When you have integrated Vonage Contact Center with Salesforce Omni-Channel presence, when an agent finishes working with an interaction or interactions including any wrap time, Vonage Contact Center changes the agent's Omni-Channel presence status to the status mapped to ContactPad's Ready state. In some situations you may want to override this setting. For example, an agent working on chats only may manually change their presence status in the Omni-Channel widget to Ready for Chats. When the agent finishes working with some chats and Vonage Contact Center changes their state in ContactPad back to Ready, the agent might prefer that Vonage Contact Center reverts their presence status to Ready for Chats instead of the mapped status.

If the revert to last status feature is enabled for your account, when an agent's ContactPad state returns to Ready after working on one or more interactions, Vonage Contact Center reverts the agent's presence status in the Omni-Channel widget to their pre-interaction status.

Integration with Salesforce external routing

An alternative approach to Salesforce Omni-Channel presence integration involves integrating with Salesforce external routing.

Salesforce external routing is a routing model within Salesforce Omni-Channel that notifies a third party that an interaction needs routing. If external routing is enabled in your Salesforce org, you can configure Salesforce to delegate routing decisions for supported interactions to Vonage Contact Center. Using your configured interaction plans, Vonage Contact Center routes the interaction to an agent according to the configuration in your chosen interaction plan in Interaction Plan Architect.

With external routing, VCC can route all types of interactions—live (such as phone calls), semi-live (such as web chats) and non-live (such as emails). For more information about interaction types, see Interaction types. External routing can also route custom objects. Custom objects are routed in the same way as cases and are treated as non-live interactions.

VCC supports external routing for the following types of work items:

Cases
Chats
Messaging
Messaging for In-App and Web
Custom objects

When Salesforce external routing is enabled, configured and integrated with your VCC account, when a record of a configured type of Salesforce object arrives in or is created in Salesforce, Salesforce routes the corresponding work item to the configured named route in VCC.

VCC routes the resulting interaction according to the settings in the named route's interaction plan. When VCC routes the interaction to a queue or to an agent, the exact events depend on which optional features are available for your account, and the type of interaction.

VCC makes routing decisions for the different interactions using logic configured in one place; you no longer need to configure the logic for routing phone calls within VCC, and the logic for routing other types of interactions in Salesforce. You can also report on all types of interaction activity - real-time and historical statistics for your agents and their interactions - within VCC.

Vonage Contact Center handles delivery errors that might occur in a third-party system. If a delivery error occurs in Salesforce when Vonage Contact Center routes an interaction to an agent, Vonage Contact Center informs the agent about unsuccessful delivery and routes the interaction to another agent.

For information about integrating with Salesforce external routing, see Configuring Salesforce external routing for Vonage Contact Center.

Limitations

Agent Post Call State

If you have set Agent Post Call State to a state other than Ready or Ready (Offline), the revert to last status feature will not work. Vonage Contact Center will update agents' presence statuses to the mapped status regardless of whether agents have changed their presence status manually.

Salesforce external routing is not compatible with integration with Salesforce Omni-Channel presence. For information about integration with Salesforce Omni-Channel, see Vonage Contact Center omni-channel solution. Ask your account manager to disable this feature.

Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice

If you are using Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice, you can use both Salesforce external routing and Salesforce Omni-Channel presence. You do not need to have the latter turned off.

To use external routing for work items other than Live Agent chats (now simply called Chat in Salesforce), you must change the owner of the item to a queue that you create for external routing. For information about creating queues for external routing, see Create queue later in this page.

In the Omni-Channel widget in Salesforce, agents remain active regardless of their ContactPad status. This will impact the Live Agent chat button. For information about working around agents' active status, see Agent Availability API.