Guest blog by:
Paul Bibby
Solutions Engineer
ResponseTap
Enabling conversations that get to the point of sale faster
Imagine if you could connect a caller’s online website journey to their phone call.
As soon as a contact center agent answers the call, they’re presented with valuable insights from the caller’s online journey, enabling a more relevant conversation that gets to the point of sale quicker and improves the customer experience. Well, that’s exactly what the ResponseTap platform enables and thanks to Cisco Finesse we have now expanded our reach.
Who are ResponseTap?
ResponseTap is the leading Call Intelligence platform. Traditionally we’ve been used by marketing teams wanting to plug the gap in their analytics and discover which campaigns drive phone calls, and their associated revenue. This is done by each visitor on the website getting a tracking number that’s not displayed to any other visitor on the website at that time. Therefore when they call the number, we can link the online journey to the phone call and show marketers where to spend their budget. But we always believed that the online journey we captured could be of just as much value for the contact center, and conversely, the data captured from the contact center, such as a sale value, could then be of benefit within our platform.
A faster, hands-on way to explore technologies and prototype solutions
When asking our customers what technologies they had in their call center, Cisco Finesse was repeatedly mentioned, so it made sense for me to find out exactly what it was and see if we could add Finesse to our portfolio. My role as Solutions Engineer involves exploring problems, researching technology and prototyping ideas. I want to be able to do this as fast and as cheaply as possible without going down too many dead ends. The Cisco website has always had a good range of collateral available about Finesse and it’s ecosystem. But no mater how many documents I read or videos I watch, I always feel the need to get my hands on a product to fully understand it; the Cisco UCCX Sandbox environment made this a possibility and within a couple of hours I was making and answering phone calls within Finesse, and all at no cost.
Digging deeper led to that “Eureka!” moment
The next step was to look at how Finesse could either accept or pull our data. If Finesse could make an API request to ResponseTap with the caller’s number, we could return all of the online behavior for that call. A stumbling point with other web-based contact center solutions has been the inability to call our API due to the browser’s same-origin security policy. Thankfully in Finesse, you can call an external REST API and there is even a sample gadget showing how to do this.
This was the eureka moment when I realized being able to display the caller’s online activity to agents would be possible, and it felt great! I just needed to understand the example code and how to develop within the Finesse Framework. I expected this to be a fairly steep learning curve, but after spending a couple of hours following the step-by-step instructions in the Learning Sample Gadget guide, I realized it was straightforward. Over the following days I modified the External REST API Sample Gadget code to make a request to the ResponseTap API and present our data, and added in a request to another endpoint that allows call outcomes to be selected and sent back to ResponseTap. The only thing that wasn’t obvious from testing within the sandbox was how external phone numbers were formatted. So I posted a message on the Cisco DevNet Finesse Communities forum and got an answer the same day.
By now we were really excited. We showed a demo to a couple of our customers in the travel sector, one of which asked to trial it with their agents. Having never deployed to a live environment before, and not being a CISCO expert, I was a little nervous, but installing the gadget to production was exactly the same as with the sandbox. We simply uploaded the files to the 3rdpartygadget folder and added the gadget to an agent’s screen by editing one line in the Finesse Layout xml file.
The feedback from agents was great; they loved being able to see the exact holiday the customer was enquiring about, price ranges they’d searched within and package upgrades they had researched online. Inevitably there were some changes asked for regarding the information displayed and the layout, but these were easy to make and test within the Sandbox.
Looking to the future
To summarize, our first steps developing for Cisco Finesse have been pain free. Voice is key for high commodity purchases and Cisco Finesse has helped us to help agents improve their conversations. Our next step is to look at how we can route calls based on the online journey; for example if they’ve looked at holidays to Italy, put them through to agents who’ve been to Italy, or if they have a high propensity to purchase, put them at the top of a queue. We’re excited to see how Cisco can help us accomplish these goals.
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Thanks Paul and Denise. It's great to learn about the real-world solutions Cisco partners are creating with Cisco technologies.