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Platform-wide feature
Optional feature
Consumers have consistently favored video for interactions where they want a personalized experience or have a complex problem they need resolved. Visual Engagement elevates conversations by enabling an agent, via a single click from within ContactPad, to escalate any interaction to a video call with screen share capabilities. This allows them to communicate visually, making them more effective and efficient, and resulting in a better customer experience.
Whilst engaged with a video call, the agent’s state and capacity will appear as occupied, informing their supervisor and other agents that they are on a call, whilst also updating the contact center routing so that no other interaction is routed through to them.
Visual Engagement is a native channel for Vonage Contact Center (VCC) and is made available to agents using ContactPad when embedded in Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or ServiceNow. Supervisors and business analysts will also be able to historically report on video interactions alongside voice and any other channel which the agent supports.
Visual Engagement enables your business to achieve the following:
Visual Engagement is available on request. If you are interested, please speak to your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager.
For information about video and screen sharing, see Video and screen sharing (Visual Engagement).
Up until now our Omnichannel capabilities have been a premium feature and required a Salesforce license. However we understand that not all our customers use Salesforce and furthermore not all our customers are looking for the full feature set of our premium license. Therefore we plan to offer an Omnichannel experience for all our customers regardless of which CRM or license they use.
Our aim is to provide multiple communication channels, from messaging channels such as SMS, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to digital channels such as web and mobile chat—where customers can interact with agents to solve their queries and be provided the same experience, regardless of device, channel and even channel provider.
The benefits of this for your customers is that they will have choice over which device to use as well as which channel to use as they contact your business. The benefit from an agent's perspective is that they can remain within the CRM whilst interacting with customers over any channel, increasing productivity and ensuring customers are answered by the right agent as quickly as possible.
This approach ensures that regardless of who provides your digital channels, Vonage can route them all harmoniously alongside voice. As we add channels to our offering, you get the choice over whether or not you want to adopt them out-of-the-box.
In Spring ‘21 we released webchat as our first native channel. Webchat requests are routed straight from your website directly to the appropriately skilled agent via the ContactPad. This means an agent can work on various interaction types all in one place, as webchat is accessible directly from your CRM, whether you use Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or ServiceNow. All the context of your customer is readily available while your agent deals with their request, saving time and improving your agent’s efficiency.
Our webchat is provided as an alternative to our existing product in Salesforce, not as a replacement. We provide the flexibility for our customers to choose their channel provider and we will continue to offer a suite of off-the-shelf options in Salesforce, MS Dynamics and ServiceNow as well as providing APIs for third party integrations. All options will work in harmony with our own native channels, since the same routing logic is employed by all.
Webchat is available on request, so please contact your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager to learn more.
For information about Webchat, see /wiki/spaces/DP/pages/3071344958.
During Winter ‘21 we announced the beta release of Messaging and Cases. In Spring ‘21 these features moved into general availability. This enables VCC to route messages and cases to agents using Salesforce External Routing. Messaging lets your company have conversations with customers in ways that are most convenient for them using messaging apps such as SMS and Facebook Messenger. Cases let your company capture work to be done using, among other methods, web-to-case and email-to-case. Agents have messages and cases routed to them in the Service Console, based on the contact center routing logic, the agents skill, capacity, and availability.
Screen Recording enables supervisors and quality managers to understand what the agents were doing on their desktops during the call and listen to the call. This improves your quality management capabilities so that you can easily identify inefficiencies.
Screen Recording enables your business to achieve the following:
For more information about screen recording, see Screen Recording in Vonage Contact Center.
Virtual Assistant delivers conversational artificial intelligence (AI) for business communication within your Vonage solution, making customer experience your competitive advantage. Virtual Assistant uses AI to deliver enhanced self-service interactions that engage every caller with natural language and enable additional capacity within your contact center.
With Virtual Assistant, you can:
Virtual Assistant interprets what the customer’s question is and, if required, asks clarifying questions to formulate the appropriate response. That response may be referencing content from an FAQ, proposing an action to update or read customer data, or routing the call to the correct queue within the Interaction Architect.
This release provides a more intuitive version of the intent builder by using a visual builder to represent your conversations more clearly.
In this release we took the next step in consolidating all administrative functions into User Admin. Functionality previously available only in Real Time and User Access have been migrated over to User Admin.
Supervisors with the appropriate permissions can now take advantage of the full User Admin Experience. This provides full parity with Real Time and much more.
User Admin now:
This new capability comes with some new permissions:
All users that previously had the Edit Agent permission under Real Time have been given the Edit User permission under User Admin.
Previously only available as early access. All customers can now archive all user types at an individual level or via bulk/import. Archiving a user prevents them from logging in, release their license, and remove them from Dashboards. All this whilst providing the ability to historically report on these users.
This has resulted in the following changes within the CSV import/export:
The ability to reset login attempts has been migrated from Real Time into User Admin. This is used to unlock and user account when it has become locked because of a high number of incorrect password attempts.
The ability to delete groups has been migrated from Real Time into User Admin. Only administrators are allowed to delete a group.
We have been working to improve the user experience or User Admin by making filtering more effective, providing quick bulk actions, improved layout, and much more.
For more information about user administration, see User Admin.
Dashboards have been extended to provide greater visibility for outbound-focused contact centers. In addition, terminology and calculations have been updated to be channel agnostic (phone, chat, video, and so on). Finally we have added some new in-demand metrics across the Agents and Interaction Details widgets.
The Interaction Details widget type has been extended to support Internal and Outbound alongside Inbound. To better support these additional interactions this widget type also has some new metrics:
Existing widget metrics names and calculations have been updated to support the multiple directions types:
As well as this step forward in metrics the addition of outbound to this widget type provides the ability to report on outbound Audio Problems, Post Call Quality Rating in ContactPad, and Call Logging Disposition codes.
The Agent Widget has been extended to provide greater insight into the running of a contact center. The following new metrics have been added:
Existing widget metrics names and calculations have been updated to better support the multiple directions types:
For more information about metrics available in Dashboards, see Real-time Analytics metrics.
We continue to make the VCC platform more open to integration than ever before.
Until now API Credentials within VCC have been generated at the account level—meaning that API credentials had Admin level privileges. Within this release we have improved the granular permissions you can apply by allowing API Credentials to operate at the user level.
Any new API Credentials generated within API Admin will now be attached to the user generating them. In addition, should that user be marked as inactive or deleted, then those API credentials will cease working.
| Many of our APIs still operate at account levels—meaning that even with user-level credentials, the APIs will grant Admin privileges. We are now beginning to migrate all APIs to enforce user permissions. |
The first API to be migrated is the Interaction Content API. API requests made to this API can only access the data the same user could through the application. This allows customers to provide programmable access to a subset of their dataset.
A new major version of the Interactions API is now available and provides customers with the ability to:
This version works in tandem with the new User-Level API Credentials. Meaning that it can only be used with user credentials and will return data and validate permissions based on the user. The API will not be able to do more than the user can through the portal.
For a migration guide from the existing version, or to review these features in detail visit Interaction Content API Documentation.
Within VCC a collection of skills can be grouped into a Virtual Queue. This virtual queue can then be used to optimize route, or for reporting. In this release we have extended the reporting capability into the Insights Stats API as part of the interaction endpoints. This provided the user with a "targetTimeToAnswer" metric for each virtual queue within a queue event.
{
"type": "Queue",
"offset": 8654,
"name": "ACD1",
"duration": 8382,
"properties": {
"interactionPlan": "0123456789",
"interactionPlanName": "Customer Support Plan", "presentedSkills": [
"Billing"
],
"virtualQueues": [
"Billing Queue"
],
"targets": [
{
"virtualQueue": "Billing Queue",
"targetTimeToAnswer": 30000
}
],
"result": "Delivered"
}
}, |
This time can be used in conjunction with the result and duration properties to calculate Service Levels in an external system.
As part of this release users are able to delete the Interaction Content—including Call Recording—for up to 1000 interactions in bulk. This functionality is available within the Interaction Search component of the VCC portal.
For information about deleting interaction content in bulk, see Deleting interaction content.
Within each region we operate, Interaction Content—including Call Recordings—has previously been stored in one core location, as detailed below:
We can now offer a second storage location in each region. Providing customers even more control of where their data is stored. The updates regional storage locations are:
| Region | Storage Locations Available |
|---|---|
| EMEA | London | Frankfurt |
| NAM | Virginia | California |
| APAC | Sydney | Singapore |
You can see where your data is stored now within the Data Retention area of VCC:
To adjust your storage location, contact the Vonage support team. A change in location is only respected for future Interaction Content.
For information about data retention, see Data Retention.
The Spring ‘20 release included a major update to the button that agents can use to report audio quality problems during a call. This was of particular benefit for inbound calls.
The Spring ‘21 release includes improved support for outbound calls in Dashboards, which means you can now get the same benefits for outbound calls.
VCC users can now:
This feature was enabled on request in Spring ‘20 and will roll out to everyone by default in this release.
For information about reporting audio problems in ContactPad, see Reporting problems in ContactPad.
To truly understand your contact center you need to know when things are going well in addition to when they’re going wrong. In Spring ‘20, the Report Audio Problems feature was added to VCC and Post Call Quality Rating was added in Summer ‘20.
Report Audio Problems is an important feature that helps VCC customers self-serve and provides VCC operations and support staff with early visibility of developing problems. However, because this feature only reports problems, it gives a distorted view of VCC call quality.
Post Call Quality Rating acts a complement to the existing Report Audio Problems feature by allowing users to provide a single overall rating (good or bad) at the end of a call. Users provide a rating which maps to an Opinion Score: a whole number between 1 and 5. These Opinion Scores can be averaged into Mean Opinion Scores or MOS: a number between 1.0 and 5.0. The MOS can be calculated for an interaction (as multiple VCC users can be engaged on a call), a location, an entire VCC account and so on.
The Opinion Scores and MOS are available in Dashboards and Statistics alongside the data from Report Audio Problems and together this provides VCC customers and VCC staff with a holistic view of VCC call quality.
This feature was enabled on request in Summer ‘20 and rolled out to everyone by default in this release.
For information about Post Call Quality Rating, see Post Call Quality Rating in ContactPad.
When an agent is in a ready state, the platform will automatically deliver any eligible interactions. If the agent is not ready for an interaction, the agent may click the release button in ContactPad rather than allow the call to ring out. Previously, clicking Release in ContactPad during the ringing phase would always terminate the call—whereas clicking Decline in WebRTC would route the call back to the queue.
Within the Spring '21 release, we aligned the two behaviors. Now during the ringing event for an inbound call, if the agent selects Decline or Release, the call is delivered back to the queue.
For information about rejecting a call in ContactPad, see How do I reject an incoming call? in Making and receiving calls in ContactPad.
Cadence is now Generally Available. We introduced this in Winter ‘21 as early access. We have improved the resilience of the product to offer seamless disaster recovery in line with our platform standard. Should an incident impact the performance of the platform which requires your account to be moved to
another node, Cadence will now continue to operate without any overhead from administrators of your account.
Studies show that it’s currently taking over four times as many attempts to connect with prospects compared to the early 2000s—as many as eight attempts on average. The typical sales representative tries only twice before they give up.
The Vonage Cadence solution was designed to specifically navigate this by allowing you to configure your entire outbound communications strategy whilst ensuring the management of that process is completely automated for your sales representatives. This reduces their time spent on administration and removes the thought process required to follow the rules of your outbound campaign. This ultimately frees them up to do what they do best—sell.
Once implemented, Vonage Cadence can help you:
Leading analysts have seen that nearly 90 percent of companies compete on customer experience alone. With your existing customer base being your most valuable asset, it’s imperative you have a strategy to effectively communicate with your customers when required. This could be reacting to CSAT scores,
rescheduling appointments, or simply following up when you said you would.
As consumers, our expectations have never been higher. However, 31 percent of service teams feel that their leaders treat customer service as an expense, not an opportunity for growth.
Once implemented, Vonage Cadence can help you:
For information about Cadence, see Cadence.
Our Beta/Early Access Program gives some customers access to VCC enhancements that are still under development. Incorporating feedback from customers during the program allows us to continue improving these features, which ensures that every feature fulfills its purpose in a range of different
environments. All customers using features in the Beta/Early Access Program must agree to participate in the feedback process.
If you are interested in gaining access to a feature in the Beta/Early Access Program, please contact your Customer Success Manager or Account Manager. Participation in this pilot program is at the discretion of Product Management and not guaranteed.
According to Salesforce, Service Cloud Voice unifies phone, digital channels, and CRM data in real-time in one centralized console. This is the contact center of the future—intelligent, unified, and fast. Now companies can:
For example, when a customer calls in, the Vonage transcription capabilities turn speech into text that can be viewed alongside customer data in the console. This empowers the agent to deliver a personalized experience based on factors like the customer’s purchase history, warranty information, or past
interactions across channels. With the call converted to text, Einstein AI can go to work by serving up recommended responses, knowledge articles, and next best actions to the agent.
VCC now enables Salesforce to deliver these benefits through the power of our Interaction Architect, Salesforce integration, and audio quality. These are key areas to a successful deployment of Service Cloud Voice.
To use Service Cloud Voice, it is possible to continue with existing call flows, users, and contact numbers—though items like case pops may need to be changed. A review of your VCC implementation is recommended to understand what changes need to be made, if any, to take advantage of Service Cloud Voice.
It is important to understand that the existing integration between Salesforce and VCC does not change and will continue to provide the existing benefits. Service Cloud Voice just provides a possible alternative to how you want Salesforce and VCC to work together
to provide benefit to your contact center.
Note that adding this service may incur professional services time and additional product charges. If you would like to be considered for the Beta/Early Access Program, please discuss it with your Customer Success Manager or Account Executive. Participation in the pilot program is at the discretion of Product Management and not guaranteed.
Historic reporting within a contact center is a key pillar of success. The new Analytics offering will bring the power of a Business Intelligent system into the VCC Portal for customers of all types. This offers the ability to:
This feature is open for limited beta access in North America only. Speak with our Account Management team if you want to help us shape the future of VCC reporting.
The interaction plans you are able to configure within VCC can be incredibly powerful. You’re able to integrate with your third-party applications such as backend databases or your CRM which can help route, prioritize, and skill interactions as we learn more about the consumer. This can enable the implementation of a self-serve IVR or simply remove the painful chain of menus for a more personalized experience—and make sure your consumers speak with the right people, in the right order.
The problem today is that once the interaction has finished, all of this processing stops. With the Spring ’21 release, VCC enables you to initiate a fresh interaction plan after the processing of an interaction has finished. The caller doesn’t need to hang around for this, as you will be able to conditionally evaluate the outcome of the previous interaction to determine what, if anything, you decide to do next.
Abandoned calls are one of many challenges for all contact center leaders. The battle to keep abandonment rates low never stops—whether that’s to meet SLAs, maintain great CSAT/NPS/Customer Loyalty, or make sure you connect with that inbound lead.
With post interaction processing, you can evaluate the profiles of abandoned callers before taking steps to get back in touch—particularly if they are high value to your business. You can add them to a dial list, or initiate a queued callback or even a more robust multi-step outbound campaign through Cadence.
If you have implemented post call surveys to track customer feedback, you can now easily process the results from within the interaction architect and push them into whatever third-party application for analysis, such as an object linked to the contact within your CSM. Depending on the feedback, you could
automatically initiate follow ups to help improve the customer’s experience with your business. But remember, you can first evaluate caller profiles before determining if they offer enough to your business.
To facilitate real processing of interactions, it’s important to understand the context of what happened before. Using Data Source Mappings, you can see the outcomes of interactions from within Dashboards or pull information directly from the insights stats API. This allows you to see if the call was delivered or abandoned, initiated a callback, broke out of the queue, or ended because the caller hung up before reaching a queue. It will also allow you to customize what’s presented within Dashboards, so you can see other key checkpoints within your Interaction Plan, such as whether the customer self-served (and how).
We are aligning the naming convention across both VCC System Status pages. This will affect the name shown in incident alerts, but existing notification subscriptions will continue.
With this release, the VCC Status Page names have been updated as detailed below:
| Current Name | New Name |
|---|---|
| Cloud 11 - UK & Europe | EMEA - London |
| Cloud 8 - UK & Europe | EMEA - Frankfurt |
| Cloud 17 - US | NAM - Virginia (Cloud 17) |
| Cloud 16 - US | NAM - California (Cloud 16) |
| Cloud 12 - APAC Sydney | APAC - Sydney (Cloud 12) |
| Cloud 14 - APAC Singapore | APAC - Singapore (Cloud 14) |
| N/A | EMEA - London (Cloud 8)* |
| N/A | EMEA - London (Cloud 11)* |
*Added in the last 4 months as part of the EMEA Infrastructure Refresh
In addition the VCC Uptime Page, names have been updated as detailed below:
| Current Name | New Name |
|---|---|
| EMEA - Cloud 11 | EMEA - London |
| EMEA - Cloud 8 | EMEA - Frankfurt |
| NAM - Cloud 17 | NAM - Virginia (Cloud 17) |
| NAM - Cloud 16 | NAM - California (Cloud 16) |
| APAC - Cloud 12 | APAC - Sydney (Cloud 12) |
| APAC - Cloud 14 | APAC - Singapore (Cloud 14) |
| N/A | EMEA - London (Cloud 8)* |
| N/A | EMEA - London (Cloud 11)* |
*Added in the last 4 months as part of the EMEA Infrastructure Refresh
The following packages and earlier versions have been deprecated:
Package | Supported Versions | Deprecated Versions | End of Life |
|---|---|---|---|
Vonage Contact Center for Salesforce | 18.251 or higher | 18.250 or lower | 18.231 or lower |
Vonage Contact Center Connect | 19.100 or higher | 18.259 or lower | 16.118.1 or lower |
Vonage Contact Center Advanced Reporting | 2.57 or higher | 2.56 or lower | 2.44 or lower |
This feature has now been replaced by the Interaction Content API. Customers may no longer request Secure FTP access to their Call Recordings for periodic download of data. This can now be achieved through the Interaction Content API.
Secure FTP may still be provided upon Termination or Expiry of the Agreement, as described in the Data Retention Service Description.
With the introduction of Supervisor Access to User Admin, we have full parity with Real Time administration functions. As of the Spring ‘21 release, administration functionality within Real Time is deprecated.
All other functions, such as changing agents states and call monitoring, will remain supported within
Real Time.
We announced the deprecation of Skill Management in Summer ‘20. This will now enter End of Life alongside the Real Time Admin Functions.
We announced the deprecation of the Call Recordings page in Summer ‘20. The End of Life of this function is now moved to Summer ‘21. However, from this release users will see a deprecation banner within the Call Recording search page.