Preferred agent routing for email & chat

[Piotr_Comtrust]

Hi Guys, is there any way to set preferred agent for incoming emails and chats (via customizer/CAD or other way)? I'm talking about on-prem FP19.

BR, Piotr

[aldets]

Hi,

Are you talking about the first conversation that is arriving into contact center?
If no, then preferred agent settings can be found in the documentations. Configurable via channel or queue. This is only for e-mails. I have not come across a preferred agent setting for chat.
If yes, then I'm quite sure that there doesn't exist such a setting. Contact Center needs to have some sort of information to give the conversation to the right agent.
Although, you could make a custom script on your own, that checks the inbox of an e-mail address and then makes a POST to Sinch RTI API with the "responsible" key and the AgentId as value. That should put the e-mail in the allocation/offering state in a few seconds (no queue login nor Ready state is required).
Unfortunetly I'm not that familiar with chat. So can't help with that.

Kind regards,
Alder

[Piotr_Comtrust]

Hi Alder, I'm talking about the second option - a new chat/email contact arrives and when queuing it is allocated to preferred agent first (similar way like phone calls).

BR, Piotr 

[aldets]

Well, the preferred agent information needs to come from somewhere. For calls it is the same way, only difference that there is an IVR inbetween that does all the magic. Although, if a customer is calling for the first time ever then the IVR does nothing special, only forwards it to the queue. I'm talking here about the old PreferredAgentIvr customizer. And then the call gets allocated to the longest waiting agent.

For e-mails or chats such a middleware doesn't exist. You can always build it yourself.

Overall if we are talking about conversations that enter the Contact Center for the first time ever, then there needs to be something in between that decides to which agent the conversation will go.
With IVR's you can make that decision, in the Customizer.
For e-mails you need to make one your own.
For chats - I'm affraid, it's quite impossible. 

NB: IF we are talking about e-mails that have already been in the system, then you can lookup Required and/or Preferred agent settings in the documentation.

Alder

[Paul_Ishmael]

Hi, 

Thanks Alder for the replies given! 

From the SC offering, the preferred agent preference is only applied after the email conversation has been replied to by an agent. Should the conversation be created by our RTI API then it is possible to apply a preference for an agent allocation beforehand.

With the current releases the preferred agent and required agent feature only applies to conversations arriving to the email channel so, emails, tasks and action items. In an upcoming release chats will also get a preferred agent offering.

Paul

[Jukka]

The topic is also opened in documentation: 
Routing a Conversation to the Same Agent (sinch.com)

BR,
Jukka

[Roman_Errapart]

With chats we also prefer to use hidden chatbot to perform all kind of routing magic. This is also one way that the documentation which Jukka pointed out recommends.

Br,

Roman

[Jukka]

Small update to the topic at this point. 
- In 23q3 release we are bringing an command to define preferred or required agent for social chats. Technically this enables an integrator to check ex. preferred agent requirement from CRM and commanding Contact Pro to follow it. This requires a chatbot or similar between ConvAPI and Contact Pro. We will there more about it soon. 

- In 23q4 we are planning (<- note the word planning) to introduce Contact Pro internal preferred agent handling. Means that we check if the customer have had an conversation earlier with any agent and we assign the previous agent as preferred. This will of course be behind channel & queue parameter. 

Comments and question around above feature can be sent to me. 😊

//Jukka 

[aldets]

All is good and nice, but doesn't the documentation refer to Cloud version? I know that Cloud and On-Prem are alot alike, but there are functionalities that work in Cloud but On-Prem has never heared of that.
Also the 23q3/23q4 updates refer to Cloud. Getting these to On-Prem might happen with FP20 or even worse FP21.

Reading the documentation again I see a new product called Sinch Flows. What is that?

PS: Is there a similar "Best Practice" page for On-Prem? Was unable to find it under "Operation Guide".

[Jukka]

Hi Aldets, 

yes, the documentation is made for cloud, but in this case applies to onpremise as well. 
The changes I referred to are indeed planned for cloud 23q3 & 23q4, which would mean that they are available for onprem in next feature pack release. Plan with feature packs is to release once per year and timing is around Q2. 

Flows is actually a deprecated product from Sinch and will be moved under open source license.  It enables IVR type of approach for social channels. We will remove mention to Flows in 23q3 update round. 

Currently we have published the best practice only for cloud, but we will see if we do the same for onpremise. 

BR,
Jukka