This blog describes how the award-winning Expertflow Hybridchat (HC) solution can be used if users want to continue using the Cisco ECE or Socialminer Chat. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll only mention ECE here, but by and large the same applies for Socialminer Chat in a UCCX environment. A difference of HC, ECE and Socialminer Chat is here. This blog describes in Scenario 2 how HC can be used with ECE without the HC gadget to:
- add or customize chat channels
- add chatbots
- filter inbound and outbound messages to meet PCI-DSS compliance and avoid DLP (Data Loss Prevention)
Finally, we describe how a HC gadget can work alongside ECE and what value it adds.
What Hybrid Chat (HC) adds to Cisco ECE
HC conferences the customer, chatbots and an agent. It shows chatbot provided answers to a human agent within an add-on gadget, and auto-answers if the Chatbot’s confidence score is sufficiently high. The agent continues to chat with Cisco ECE in a separate gadget. Routing, reporting, storage, agent identity management is done by ECE and CCE.
Compared to a traditional handoff from a bot to a human – which only provides Chatbot automation at the beginning of a chat (left side below), HC permanently automates certain elements of conversations throughout the conversation (right side):
The two ways how HC can be used alongside ECE are:
- HC as a second gadget next to the ECE, showing suggested answers and auto-answering during the chat
- HC as a front-end to interconnect to customer-facing chat channels and chatbots, and then doing a traditional handoff to ECE, no Hybridchat agent gadget
Scenario 1: Add-on Hybrichat gadget
In this scenario, the HC gadget runs alongside ECE chat gadget. Routing to the agent, reporting and agent identity management is done by ECE. The agent can chat with the customer through ECE.
The HC gadget presents chatbot-suggested answers to the agents and displays color-coded confidence scores to the agent. It will also auto-answer after timeouts on behalf of the agent. The agent can click to select one of the alternative HC-provided answers. If the agent starts typing on ECE, the auto-answer timer is stopped. To a large degree, the advantages of Hybridchat are achieved.
Switching between chats – state synchronization
Whenever the agent changes focus from one chat to the next in the ECE, the focus changes as well in HC – both gadgets have state synchronization.
Architecture
ECE doesn’t allow the creation of agent-originated messages, so HC answers can only be added as customer-originated messages. ECE supports fonts and rich text, which means chatbot-originated messages can be posted on the agent ECE gadget in a separate color – see the last orange-colored message in the diagram below. To the agent, chatbot-provided answers will appear on the same side as customer messages, but in different formatting.
HC decides whether to send agent answers or bot answers. To the customer on the left, both agent or bot-originated messages will look like call center originated messages, so the customer experience is the same.
All chat messages between the contact center and the customer will go through HC. HC decides to insert a bot-generated auto-answer after timeout with a certain confidence score. HC also takes care of channel adaptation (Skype, FB Messenger, SMS, Whatsapp,…).
Limitations as compared to normal HC
Compared to normal hybrid chat with a unified gadget
- the suggested answers are not shown within the same chat gadget.
- the agent can only fully accept or reject an answer suggested by the Chatbot, but not modify them
- an agent can’t write a message to the customer in ECE and easily highlight it as template message to be added to the answers to be suggested by the chatbot looking forward
- Chatbot control (conversation rollback, tagging,…) is limited
- Secondary differences are related to the difference of the chat tool (ECE vs hybridchat), such as flexibility of Storage, Access Control Lists, Reporting,…
Scenario 2: Traditional Handoff
In this scenario, HC initially handles the chat with the chatbot, interconnects to all chat channels (FB Messenger, SMS, Webchat, Whatsapp,…), and then hands off the conversation permanently to the contact center agent using Cisco ECE Chat. There is no HC Finesse Gadget and no auto-answers during the conversation. Hybridchat can here also act as a data filter with the Chatbots or RegEx parsers, and fulfil certain security functions (denial of service, data loss prevention, masking of sensitive information,..)
This reduced version of Hybridchat provides the following features on top of SM/ ECE chat and can be purchased with or without professional services of expertflow:
- native connectors to Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, Viber, SMS via an SMPP gateway, Telegram, Whatsap (via Twilio or Messagebird).
- native integration to Chatbots for a simple handoff, such as IBM Watson, Google Dialogflow, rasa.ai, Microsoft Botframework. Storing of the chatbot interaction, and forwarding the bot interaction history as system message at the start of a conversation with the agent.
- consolidated interaction history of chat and voice calls in one single customer journey (Expertflow CIM)
- storage of customer-originated attachments (images, videos,…) and forwarding the URL to the attachment to the agent’s chat
Additional services to either SM/ ECE or HC
- transfer of context from customer information (link to navigation history, captcha result, forms information) to Finesse (or the Expertflow CIM Finesse gadget), and initiating an action as a Finesse workflow
- Customized customer webchat or mobile chat interfaces
- Live customer website navigation on the website during a live chat session, in the form of messages in a different font as seen in the agent interface