Q3 '22 release

 Platform-wide feature

 Optional feature

General Availability Features

ContactPad Enhancements

Choice of Warm or Cold Transfer 

Within ContactPad, your account can be configured to warm transfer (agent goes with the customer) and cold transfer (agent drops immediately) calls. They are mutually exclusive. If enabled for your account, this feature gives agents the choice of warm or cold behavior when making a transfer.

To enable this feature, contact your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager.

For more information, see Warm and cold transfers in ContactPad.

Guidance for Agents Abandoning Interactions 

In Q3 ‘22, we added new guidance in ContactPad about abandoning interactions. This guidance tells agents that they should not abandon interactions unless they have been unable to release them in the correct way. It is available in both multiple and single interaction ContactPad.

Abandoning interactions in ContactPad ends them immediately. This may negatively impact statistics, recordings, and customer experience. Agents should only abandon interactions if attempts to release them have failed.

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For more information, see Abandoning calls in Making and receiving calls in ContactPad and Using multi-interaction routing.

Service Cloud Voice

Call Transfer 

Call transfer is a core part of the VCC platform. We have further enhanced the capability for the Service Cloud Voice integration. The updated transfer feature allows agents to do a warm transfer to an interaction plan or a transfer to an external number. The configuration for these transfer use cases is the same as for the core VCC platform. The Service Cloud Voice Omni-Channel widget allows agents to filter for interaction plans and type in an external number. In the first image you can see that an agent has used a filter of “ma” to search transfer destinations. The agent can see a combination of interaction plans and agents. In the second image, an agent has entered an external telephone number. The agent can now press “Call” and then consult, merge, or transfer as they would with an internal Service Cloud Voice call.

For more information, see Consulting, transferring, and conferencing (or merging) calls in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Conferencing/Merge 

Conferencing is a core part of the VCC platform. We have further enhanced this capability for our Service Cloud Voice integration. Conferencing is known as merging using Service Cloud Voice terminology and is an extension of the transfer feature. The configuration for the conference use case is the same as for the core VCC platform. The Service Cloud Voice Omni-Channel widget allows agents to dial an external number to conference with. In the image you can see that two other parties are now connected to the current agent, one of which is the external telephone number.

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For more information, see Consulting, transferring, and conferencing (or merging) calls in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Integration with Salesforce High Velocity Sales (HVS)

Salesforce’s High Velocity Sales (HVS) (soon to be renamed Sales Engagement) product allows you to accelerate your inside sales process with a high-productivity workspace. Using HVS, managers can create sales cadences — custom sales processes that guide sales reps through handling different types of prospects. Those cadences appear for sales reps in the Work Queue, a task list that appears inside the Sales Console. The VCC platform passes the after-call work events to our Service Cloud Voice integration. This enables you to work with HVS and to advance HVS Sales Cadence after your agent wraps up a call.

For information, see High Velocity Sales in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Timed After-Conversation Work

Most calls require work after the call ends — for example, sending an email, writing some notes, or updating a case. Salesforce provides a pilot feature called “Give Agents Time for After-Conversation Work”. The feature allows supervisors to set and manage the amount of time agents spend on work after a conversation. This tells agents roughly how much time to spend on tasks. The VCC platform passes the after-call work events to our Service Cloud Voice integration to enable this Salesforce pilot. The following image shows how After Conversation Work is displayed within Salesforce.

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For information, see After conversation work in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Desk Phone Support

Service Cloud Voice has enabled voice to be blended with digital channels and become native to Salesforce. Desk phone support now allows you to benefit from blending digital channels whilst allowing you to keep your current investment and to use the desk phone of your choice, such as a desk phone or a mobile phone. With desk phone support, a Service Cloud Voice user can alternate between a desk phone and WebRTC, and set their phone number. The user doesn’t need to rely on an administrator to make these changes for them. The image here shows how the user can change their phone type and number.

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Known limitation: After the user changes their phone type, they must refresh the web page otherwise the call controls will be disabled.

For more information, see Desk phone support in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Salesforce Omni-Channel Flows Route VCC Calls to Interaction Plans

We can now notify Salesforce about an inbound call which enables Salesforce to use Omni-Channel flows. Omni-Channel flows can route the call to a VCC interaction plan, which can then route the call to an agent. This allows you to make routing decisions in Salesforce as well as in VCC.

It also provides the option of using Salesforce as a single routing engine for all interactions. Having a single routing engine can reduce setup and maintenance time. The single routing engine can also ensure agents are routed work effectively across all channels.

For more information, see Omni-Channel flow routing in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Presence Status Mapping from VCC to Service Cloud Voice

We now support presence mapping from VCC to Service Cloud Voice. This enhances the current mapping of presences from Service Cloud Voice to VCC and means we can synchronize presence in the two systems.

If an agent goes into a presence in VCC that prevents them from taking calls, Salesforce is notified. The agent’s presence in Salesforce is updated to make both the supervisor and agent aware they are not ready for any new interactions.

For more information, see Presence mapping between SCV and VCC in Vonage Premier for Salesforce Voice.

Salesforce Integration

VCC Support for Salesforce Shield’s Deterministic Encryption

Salesforce Shield allows you to encrypt specific fields within your Salesforce org. VCC now supports Shield encryption for fields that use the deterministic encryption type. We support installing ContactWorld for Salesforce and ContactWorld Connect in Salesforce orgs with Shield platform encryption enabled. You can use fields encrypted with deterministic encryption in line with Salesforce’s limitations. This allows you to have the security Salesforce Shield provides, alongside the rich feature set of VCC.

For details, see Considerations for Using Deterministic Encryption.

For more information, see Creating a single Dial List (first-come, first-served), Creating a single Dial List (record ownership), Creating multiple individual Dial Lists for agents, and Retrieving data from Salesforce.

External Routing Supports Agent Capacity in Salesforce

With External Routing, when routing an interaction to an agent, VCC notifies Salesforce of the capacity taken up by the routed interaction. This means that, in Omni Supervisor, a supervisor can see how much capacity an agent has available. Also, if you are using Salesforce’s Live Agent, the chat button displayed on your website can be disabled automatically when your agents have no capacity to take any new chats. This ensures that chats only enter the queue when an agent has the capacity to work on them.

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For information, see Capacity in Vonage Contact Center omni-channel solution.

Payment Card Industry (PCI)

Third-party Secure Payments Integrated with VCC

Some VCC customers are commercially or operationally tied to a Payment Service Provider (PSP). This PSP may not be compatible with the Agent Assist, Self Service, or Digital Secure Payment capabilities of VCC. Currently, VCC initiates, and remains in control of, the payment process when taking an Agent Assist, Self Service, or Digital Secure Payment, but some PSPs need to be the initiator (and controller) of the process. These models are very different from each other with commands and API calls flowing in opposite directions.

This new capability enables our partner (PCI Pal) to instruct VCC to secure an existing customer call leg for payment. This means that PCI Pal and PSPs who need to initiate payments can work together to use this capability to take secure payments in VCC calls. In turn, this means that new and existing VCC customers who cannot switch to a PSP compatible with Agent Assist, Self Service, or Digital Secure Payments may be able to use VCC for Secure Payments through their existing PSP.

For information, see Payments in Vonage Contact Center and IVR Secure Payments solution.

Dashboards

Agent Availability by Interaction Type Metric 

In Dashboards you can report on the availability of agents in queues within your contact center. Currently, such metrics tell you which agents have 100% of their capacity available, and do not specify which types of interactions agents are available for.

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In Q3 ‘22, we added a new metric — Agent Availability (by type). Using this metric in reports allows you to see the number of agents who are available for each type of interaction — live, semi-live, and non-live. Visibility of an agent’s availability considers all aspects of the VCC routing engine. These include interrupting cases (non-live interactions) and an agent’s capacity for handling more than one interaction simultaneously.

For information, see Real-time Analytics metrics.

Extended Filter for Agent Presences

In Dashboards you can filter data in agent widgets by an agent’s presence. For example, you may want to display agent data for agents in the Online presence only. Currently, you can filter only by presence categories — Online, Away, Extended Away, and Logged Out.

Since Q3 ‘22, you can filter by all presences, not just by presence categories. You can filter by all default and custom presences within the categories.

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This allows you to view the agents in the exact presence of interest. Combining this information with browser notifications, a dashboard user can be alerted as agents spend a configurable amount of time in a given presence.

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For information, see Filtering the data in your widget in Using Real-time Analytics.

‘Online’ presence is now ‘Ready’