Q1 '22 release

 Platform-wide feature

 Optional feature

General Availability Features

Portal Navigation Improvements 

To improve user experience and make it easier to navigate, we have introduced the tree structure menu. 

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With the new tree structure menu, the number of top level items can be reduced by half. Enabled features from similar domains are grouped together and displayed under the top level menu. For example, Account Settings top level menu contains following features: API Credentials (formerly API Admin), Configuration (formerly System Settings), Data Retention. Features nested in the top level item are ordered alphabetically. 

The top level menu is based on the most frequently used features. Top level features include features such as ContactPad, Real Time, Dashboards, User Admin, Interaction Content.

The number of features that are available in the menu depends on your account configuration. Only features available in your account appear in the menu.

Some of the previous feature names presented in the menu were renamed and can be found in the new place on the list. 

Example of top level menu item containing nested features from account settings domain.

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ContactPad Improvements

On-Platform Transfers for Outbound Calls 

Historically agents were unable to transfer outbound calls directly into the platform. This led to agents needing to either ask customers to dial back into the correct team themselves, or transfer the call over back into the Vonage Contact Center number. This led to a poor agent experience, along with complications with reporting and call quality degradation.

From the Q1 ‘22 release, agents are be able to transfer outbound calls directly to interaction plans, with the ability to either warm or cold transfer the call based on account configuration.

Dialable Interaction Plans 

Historically, agents needing to collaborate with colleagues over the phone would need to search for the specific person within the ContactPad address book. Interaction plans control the priority, routing, and queuing of interactions, and are now available to be dialed directly when making an outbound call.

Remove Queues from the Address Book 

We recognize our customers build significant complexity into their implementation to allow for the smarter reporting, routing, and prioritization of interactions. This often leads to creation of a large number of interaction plans and queues which are all directly exposed to the agents within the address book.

In previous releases we have looked to improve the transfer experience. We have allowed system administrators to define whether an interaction plan is available for transfer, as well as offered configuration for specific short codes to appear in the list. Within the Q1 ‘22 release, you are now able to remove all queues from the address book to complete the initiative to simplify the experience and give system administrators full autonomy to control what is presented to agents.

Update to ContactPad Address Book for VBC Linked Accounts 

After the Q1 ‘22 release, the ContactPad address book no longer immediately loads all available. The ContactPad address book now opens with an empty area waiting for a search string to be entered. After typing a minimum of three (3) characters into the search field, the address book presents the first 200 contacts matching the search from all available directory sources in alphabetical order.

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Transfer Directly to VBC User’s Voicemail 

Prior to the Q1 ‘22 release, transferring calls to VBC UC users required the contact center agent to transfer to the UC user's extension and wait for the transfer-to-voicemail timeout-settings to elapse. Since the Q1 ‘22 release, contact center agents are now able to transfer directly to the UC user’s voicemail without ringing their extension or having to wait for the transfer to voicemail timeout settings to elapse.

Updates to the ContactPad interface enable contact center agents to transfer calls directly to VBC users voicemail by selecting the voicemail icon from the ”make call” menu and call VBC users by selecting the telephone icon.

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Dashboards

Support for Short Abandoned Calls 

Abandoned calls are one of the key indicators used to measure the health of a contact center: Abandon Rate, Abandoned, Avg Time To Abandon and the overall SLA. Sometimes callers abandon prematurely after entering the queue. This does not offer your agents the opportunity to answer the call but still counts towards the metrics served by the dashboard.

Since the Q1 ’22 release, supervisors are able to configure dashboards to omit these calls from your metrics to give a truer reflection on the health of your queues. These interactions are defined as Short Abandons and available to be presented on your dashboards. If they were abandoned after this time, they are counted as Abandoned.

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Improved Reporting for Queue Consults 

Vonage enables agents to consult into an interaction plan and queue on a customer’s behalf. The improved reporting for queue consults provides visibility of agent queuing activity within Dashboards, Salesforce Advanced Reporting and the Insights Stats API.

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The Agent Consult to Queue modelling improvements guide in Insights Stats API provides further details on how the change affects the API model.

Within Dashboards, this change is accompanied by:

Six new metrics

• Cancelled (Total)

• Cancelled (Recall)

• Cancelled (Transfer)

• Avg Time to Cancel (Any)

• Avg Time to Cancel (Recall)

• Avg Time to Cancel (Transfer)

Queuing party filter

A new queuing party filter of the Queue widget type.

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Agent transfers option

If you select Offered or SLA metrics within the ‘Queues’ data type, you can include or exclude interactions that the agent transferred to another queue.

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Overall, these improvements provide users visibility of when an agent is queuing, if the agent gives up and recalls the customer, and finally if the agent transfers the customer into the queue part way through the queuing period. 

Interaction Timelines 

Interaction timelines give the ability to click into, and visualize, an interaction within Dashboards.

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This feature provides a single visual overview of what has happened during an interaction. Admins, supervisors, and agents can understand how an interaction has been handled. Times are detailed for queuing (agent and customer), alerting, connected, hold, wrap up and delivery failures.

Payment Card Industry (PCI)

Secure Digital Payments 

Secure Digital Payments allow agents to send customers payment links via SMS. The customer then pays in a web browser as if this were any other online transaction. The customer and agent can choose to take the payment immediately with agent assistance guiding the customer through the payment process, or after the call (within 72 hours of the payment link being sent) at a time that is more convenient to the customer.

Digital Payments can be used in a variety of scenarios where traditional, audio-based, payments will not work, cannot be used, or are undesirable. Digital Payments can be deployed standalone or configured for use along-side the existing Agent Assist and IVR payment methods.

Screen Recording

Screen Recording Desktop Application 

Screen Recording allows supervisors and quality managers to understand what agents were doing on their desktops during the call, and to listen to the call. This improves quality management capabilities, making it easy to identify inefficiencies. Screen Recording has already been released and this desktop application is an enhancement. It replaces the Chrome extension.

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Screen Recording enables your business to achieve the following:

• Identify coaching opportunities to improve call efficiency

• Record one, two, or all of the screens attached to the computer that the agent is using, not just browsers or applications

• Understand after call work activities

• Synchronize desktop activity with audio recordings

• Enable playback of multiple screens at once

• Zoom into agents’ screens

• Download audio and video in a single file

• Easily identify which calls have just audio and/or transcription and/or screen recordings 

• Store screen recordings securely

• Set permissions on who can view screen recordings

• Provide central control of whose screens are recorded

• Link screen recordings to Conversation Analyzer

Salesforce Service Cloud Voice

External Routing for Service Cloud Voice 

Service Cloud Voice brings digital and voice channels together into a single agent experience allowing agents to accept different work items all from the Salesforce Omni-Channel widget. To ensure agents are as effective as possible, it is important items are routed to the appropriate agent based on their capacity and skills. In order to achieve this, one routing engine should control all these decisions, and now this is possible.

Vonage for Service Cloud Voice now works with our existing External Routing solution.

Vonage Contact Center routes the interaction (for example, voice, chat) to an agent according to the configuration in your chosen interaction plan. This means you can have a single routing engine for all channels, handled by an agent in Salesforce. With one routing engine, you also benefit from one source of truth for your reporting all of which is available within Salesforce.

This ensures your most important channel, voice, is being routed by a specialist Contact Center vendor, whilst harmoniously being routed alongside your digital channels. 

External Routing for SCV - Transfer to Queue 

Now that agents can use External Routing with Service Cloud Voice, they can also make use of the features Salesforce offer for transferring interactions. This means agents can transfer to a Salesforce queue. By selecting a queue to transfer the interaction to, agents can make use of this queue to distribute the work to the most appropriate agent.

Omnichannel

External Routing - Transfer to Interaction Plan 

Previously when transferring cases whilst using External Routing, agents were only able to transfer a case, to a specific agent. Routing to a specific agent meant that work could not be equally distributed through an interaction plan to the whole team, and agents needed prior knowledge of who they needed to transfer the case to in the first instance. Now agents can transfer to an interaction plan or a specific agent through ContactPad. Agents no longer have to worry about who to transfer to, and can make use of the interaction plan to distribute the case to the most appropriate agent.

Administration

Interaction Architect Refresh 

The Interaction Architect and IVR Data Collector user interfaces have been improved to give a consistent look and feel when compared to the other areas of the application.