2025.1 release

 Platform-wide feature

 Paid-for feature

 Enhancement to paid-for feature

Important updates

Shim Calling applet renamed to 'Route to Interaction Plan'

We renamed the Shim applet to the Route to Interaction Plan applet. All functionality remains the same.

General Availability Features

Screen Recording

Pause and resume recordings

Admins can now configure screen recording to pause the recording of screens when the audio recording is paused, and resume screen recording when the audio recording is resumed.

Intelligent Workspace

We’re excited to announce the continued launch of our new agent experience — Intelligent Workspace. Intelligent Workspace simplifies business and elevates customer and employee engagement with an AI-powered omnichannel agent workspace that makes personalized, effective connections accessible to organizations and their customers in the channel of their choice.

Following an initial pilot period, the Intelligent Workspace is available in our NAM and EMEA regions with the following features currently available:

Voice support: WebRTC or PSTN inbound and outbound call functionality, with features such as consult, transfer, hold, pause and resume recordings, and click-to-dial.

Voicemail drop: Agents can record messages and play them to a contact’s voicemail during an outbound call, allowing the agent to move on from the call and continue their work — this saves time and, therefore, increases the agent's productivity.

Digital channels: Inbound support for interactions over webchat, SMS (Beta), WhatsApp (Beta), and email (Beta).

Agent hints: When an interaction is delivered, a short guide, script, or any custom HTML can be shown to the agent. This hint can be reviewed or hidden whilst handling the interaction. The hint component is specific to each interaction and can be customized with HTML elements to personalize the hint as your business requires.

Content storage. Call recordings, digital transcripts, notes, and disposition codes are all saved as interaction content, accessible within the Interaction Content search page and API, and stored in line with your existing retention period.

Mixed-mode agent experiences: Seamless support for any combination of agent setups — for example, Service Cloud Voice, ContactPad, and Intelligent Workspace — all in one account.

Shared admin: The ability to utilize existing admin and reporting configuration means less admin configuration and setup, as features can be used across agent setups. For example, one interaction plan can be used to deliver to agents using a mixture of ContactPad and Intelligent Workspace.

Customer 360 features

CRM integrations

Intelligent Workspace supports 13 CRM integrations: Bullhorn, Clio, ConnectWise, Google, Hubspot, JobDiva, MS Dynamics, NetSuite, Office365, Salesforce, Sugar, Zendesk, and Zoho CRM. Selected CRMs — Google, Hubspot, MS Dynamics, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Zoho CRM — can be integrated with our data connector.

For each CRM integration, agents can read, create, and update CRM records, click to dial, view CRM records, define custom layouts for agents, synchronize CRM data with Intelligent Workspace, and automatically log interactions as CRM activities. Agents can also work in the CRM interface in a separate tab as required.

These capabilities allow agents to provide a personalized experience to their customers, leveraging the suite of personalization features described below.

Personalization

The Customer 360 section of the Insights panel in Intelligent Workspace shows context-based information relating to an agent’s current interaction with the customer.

• Automatic identification of customers. Intelligent Workspace automatically identifies the customer when the agent receives an inbound interaction from any supported channel. 

• Automatic record pop. Based on the interaction plan and data connector integration, Intelligent Workspace can pop specific CRM records automatically. For IVR use cases, if a customer provides a CRM object (for example, Case ID) through the IVR, the panel displays the Case details alongside customer information. 

• Customer profile. The system delivers a detailed customer profile for inbound interactions, including CRM details like name, email, and location.

• Customer engagement history (CEH). CEH provides recent customer interactions and key details (for example, agent notes, disposition codes, and sentiment), helping agents engage in data-driven dialogue.

• Auto-logging interactions. Customer interactions are logged automatically in the CRM as tasks or activities, including details like title, disposition code, and agent notes.

Agent Assist

These agent productivity features leverage AI to improve and enhance the agent's efficiency, and productivity, and reduce the average handle time. This requires an additional license. The following features are currently available in NAM and EMEA:

• Real-time transcription — converts words spoken during a voice customer interaction to text in real-time.

• Real-time sentiment (voice) — analyzes the sentiment of the customer during the call to indicate whether it is positive, negative, or neutral.

• Real-time summarization (voice) — generates a summary of a customer voice interaction quickly after a call.

In future releases, all new Intelligent Workspace features will be detailed within the release notes alongside our other existing product lines. For more information about the Intelligent Workspace, please contact your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager.

Message-type interaction plan 

Alongside the introduction of Intelligent Workspace, we announced a new type of interaction plan called ‘Message’, which provides admins with access to all the applets that will interact with digital channels. The following applets are currently available:

• ACD

• Announcer

• Data Connector

• Data Router

• Menu (SMS only)

• Schedule Router

• Set Data Source

• Skill Tagger 

Default plans are designed for other types of media, such as phone, Salesforce external routing or API.

Channels UI and lifecycle profiles for email 

We announced a new admin page that serves as a central hub for all media channels and their addresses. Over time, this page will replace the destinations currently found in Interaction Plan Management (IPM).

The first channel available for configuration on this new page is email, which agents can handle through the new Intelligent Workspace. The Channels UI allows customers to authenticate a new Google or Microsoft email account. Admins can also set up the inbound settings for this email address — just like the options available in IPM — by adding an optional email signature and creating a lifecycle profile. 

Admins can create lifecycle profiles for an individual email address or for a media channel type.

These profiles allow admins to control certain aspects of the lifecycle of an interaction that is received on this address:

• Liveness — indicates whether this interaction is classed as live, semi-live or non-live, determining whether interactions can be interrupted or interrupt other interactions

• Parked interactions 

  • Unpark to — indicates the interaction plan that an auto-unparked interaction is sent to and whether to deliver to the same agent or a new one. An interaction can be auto-unparked if the end customer sends a new message within the same session.

  • Agent time-outs 

    • Park after — how long the system will wait until an interaction is automatically parked without a customer message.

    • End after — how long the system will wait until an interaction is automatically ended without a customer message.

Administration

Centralized Scheduling — general availability 

We introduced an enhanced experience for managing contact center schedules with Centralized Scheduling, available now for all accounts.

Currently, opening times are controlled within the Router-Time based applet within Interaction Plan Architect. In the event of a schedule change, such as new opening times, all time-based router applets must be updated manually across all interaction plans. This is time-consuming and error-prone. 

To address this, we rolled out a more user-friendly approach for admins to control their contact center schedules. The feature consists of two main parts: a centralized admin page for creating schedules and a new applet within Interaction Architect.

New centralized admin page
Within the admin page, admins can create and manage schedules. Within these schedules, admins can set time zones and define timings for each day, including multiple timings per day. Additionally, they can assign default and corresponding service statuses for those times. Service statuses, such as Closed, Open, Lunch, and Special day, translate to routes within the interaction plan, allowing different timings to have specific announcements, for example. Admins can also create special days in a schedule. Special days, which do not conform to regular opening days, have all the same features as standard days, including multiple timings per day. Special days can also be repeatable.

New applet
The new applet within Interaction Plan Architect enables admins to configure the routing of the different service statuses to individual applets, allowing unique customer experiences based on time.

Admin portal UI changes 

We announced the first wave of improvements to our admin portal as part of our ongoing commitment to enhancing the user experience. This release marks the beginning of a long-term project aimed at unifying the design and functionality across the portal, ensuring a more seamless and intuitive experience for all users.

Here’s what’s new in this release:

• Refreshed main menu — the left menu has been enhanced for both design and functionality. When hovered over, it temporarily overlays the page content, providing quick access without disrupting your workflow. Once clicked, the menu locks into place (‘docks’), smoothly shifting the page content to the right for a clear and focused layout.

• Aligned page backgrounds — experience a cohesive look and feel across the portal, with consistent background styling.

• Unified page titles — all page titles are now consolidated within the top bar of the portal, providing a streamlined and modern appearance.

These updates are just the beginning. As we continue this journey, expect regular enhancements that will further refine and elevate your experience within the admin portal.

As a next step, we will focus on aligning the main layouts used across all pages to ensure consistency and improve usability throughout the portal.

Bulk download for interaction content 

We announced the new features available for bulk downloading interaction content.

Admins can now download various interaction content to an AWS S3 bucket or Azure Blob Storage. The content includes call recordings, voicemails, screen recordings, transcripts, and more.

Downloads can be set up to occur on a recurring basis, allowing Vonage to automatically copy content and metadata into the configured storage location. Additionally, users have the option to trigger one-time mass downloads of interaction content between specified dates.

Please note that all interaction content downloaded off the platform is no longer the responsibility of Vonage. Only administrators are granted permission to create and manage bulk downloads of interaction content, and this functionality can be accessed within the data retention page.

Insights

Team Monitoring: Abandon interactions 

In the Team Monitoring section, when a supervisor attempts to change an agent's presence while the agent is actively assigned to an interaction, the selected presence status is marked as ‘intended’. This status will take effect only after the agent concludes all active interactions. Consequently, supervisors cannot force an agent to log out or change their presence if they have any interactions, for example, if they are stuck in an unexpected interaction state after declining an interaction.

To enhance supervisory control over agents’ presence, we introduced a feature that allows supervisors to abandon an interaction on behalf of an agent, providing a more effective management solution.

Team Monitoring: Voice monitoring in Ready for outbound state 

We introduced a significant enhancement to our voice monitoring functionality, allowing supervisors to monitor agent interactions seamlessly across all outbound presence configurations. 

Previously, while set to ‘Ready (offline)’, supervisors could monitor interactions and remain ineligible for inbound interactions. However, accounts set to ‘Ready for Outbound’ did not have the same ability. This update eliminates that limitation, enabling continuous monitoring without the risk of being routed to any inbound interactions.

As a result, supervisors can now focus on providing real-time support and guidance without interruption, further improving the monitoring experience and enhancing overall team management.

Interaction Architect

Last in, first out (LIFO) routing 

We introduced a new behavior type with the ACD applet called ‘Last in, first out’ (LIFO). This behavior enables the queue to prioritize more recent interactions over older interactions, unlike the current queuing behavior — First in, first out (FIFO) — which favors older interactions.

The new LIFO interactions are prioritized over FIFO interactions while continuing to respect skills and groups. Due to the nature of these interactions, SLA, predicted waiting times, and queue positions are not supported.

Increased queue timeout 

We increased the amount of time for a queue timeout up to 30 days, defined in seconds. Previously the timeout was 9999 seconds (166 minutes). This increase provides improved usability for different types of interactions such as callbacks, emails, SMS, or external routing interactions. Such interactions can remain in the queue for longer periods of time without breaking out or needing to remain in the queue permanently.

Security

Two-factor authentication (WhatsApp and SMS)