Hybrid Chat (Customer-Agent-Bot)

Standalone  / Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX), Enterprise (UCCE or PCCE), Freeswitch, FusionPBX

Unify livechat and bots by conferencing with our award-winning live chat solution:

  • Customers via any rich messaging chat and media channel: Facebook Msgr, WebChat, Whatsapp, SMS, Instagram, Twitter DM, Telegram, Viber, RCS, ..)
  • Livechat Agents using a web app, a contact center Desktop app (for ex Cisco Finesse) or your CRM (Oracle Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle Service Cloud, SAP,..)
  • ..and chatbots (IBM Watson Assistant, Microsoft Cognitive Svcs, Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow, rasa.ai,..)

As compared to other live chat solutions:

  • Hybridchat can integrate with your callcenter (Cisco, Genesys, Freeswitch/ FusionPBX) for routing, skills, stats and unified agent desktop app
  • supervisor monitoring and group chat
  • can be embedded within a CRM for customer profile popup

Hybridchat can operate in push-mode for formal contact centers with dedicated agents. For SMB's , it can also run in pull-mode and raise alerts via internal chat tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Slack or Rocketchat via Webhooks.

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If the bot is not able to answer the question and no agent is available, it can suggest a callback or chatback when agents become available.

The bot is is managing the bulk of the chat conversation and hands off to and is automatically assisted by a human agent whenever the bot's confidence score is low ("hybrid chat").  The bot will continue to auto-respond after a timeout, the duration of which depends on the bot's confidence score. After handoff, the agent is also assisted by the bot - a so-called AI assisted agent.

The conversational platform can also work without bots, simply connecting multiple chat channels to agents. Enable your agents to send a chat message (such as an SMS) to a contact while they're on the call with that contact. It can also integrate with multiple bots/ dialogue engines/ virtual concierges, so the Chatframework or CC agent can choose the best answer from several bots. You are not bound to any particular bot.

The chat tab of each of the 7 customers above is color-coded (green, orange, red), indicating the bot’s confidence score of it's NLU (Natural Language Understanding) for that particular conversation. This score also determines the hold time until the bot’s primary answer will be sent, unless the agent manually overwrites the bot’s suggested answer before the timeout.

Hybrid Chat

Instead of a basic handoff from a bot to a human agent, where most of the conversation will continue to be handled by an agent, Hybrid chat engages and uses the bot during the entire conversation. This reduces the workload to call center agents or allow them to handle more conversations in parallel.

An agent can serve and blend in and out to multiple chats in parallel.

Hybrid Chat in Cisco Finesse

Hybrid Chat agent gadget can be embedded in Cisco Finesse, or it can run independently of any contactcenter, as a basic live chat solution.

Hybrid Chat in Microsoft Dynamics 365

Hybrid Chat Agent Gadget can be embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 or USD (Unified Service Desk) to allow an agent to handle chats from within the CRM. The integration also allows automatic customer profile screen-pop on chat arrival. This builds on our established CRM connectors.

Mobile Agent

The mobile client for Android and iPhones enables agents to serve clients while they are on the go, without access to a desktop. Audio Notifications inform them of incoming chats. This is ideal in situations where you have either a low volume, with infrequent chat requests, or with very high volumes where you need to onboard agents on the fly.

Rich Messaging

Rich Messaging, such as Carousels,  buttons, Geo-location,.. are fully supported across chat channels that support these.

Visual IVR

Hybridchat is also a Visual IVR. Enrich or complement  IVR sessions  with a chat experience, for example by exchanging SMS messages with callers while they are being queued on the IVR to an agent. Chatting and choosing options from a visual menu is faster than listening through lenghty menus, so the customer experience will improve. Alternatively, for conversational IVR solutions, it allows you to capture information that might not have been captured properly by a speech recognition engine. Anothfr use-case is to get the GPS geo-location. of the caller. Once the call is transferred to the agent, the agent can continue the chat session that was initiated via the visual IVR. Available with Cisco CVP.

Media Blending and campaigns

Media blending means that agents will serve alternatively voice calls or chat/ emails, depending on the volume of incoming requests as defined in the contact center's skill based routing.

Hybridchat leverages your contact center for media routing, reporting, CTI, skills and agents, with

  • Details of any interaction (voice, email, text) are stored in CIM, so if your customer calls you at noon and then calls at four, the bot will be aware that this chat might be related to a previous call.
  • If you plan to launch an SMS campaign and a customer calls before you execute the campaign, the agent receiving a call could handle the case while he's on the call with the customer, and the scheduled OB call won't be placed.
  • If there are many Voice Calls, you could postpone answering temporarily to Emails or Chats. Or the Chatbot could inform the user that he can’t answer this particular question, but that your company would be happy to call him back once an agent becomes available. The callback request is then forwarded to the Expertflow Campaign Manager and to the Cisco Dialer.

Hybridchat can be enhanced with a multi-channel campaign management license. This blog describes how chat ties into  campaign management .

Expertflow Hybridchat vs Cisco ECE/ Socialminer Chat

Hybridchat (HC) is an alternative to and independent of Cisco ECE/ Socialminer. Hybridchat ...

  • is a Middleware between Bots, Chat Channels, Contact centers and CRM solutions. You remain free to switch and combine bots, chat channels, your contact center and CRM at any point. There is no lock-in. Hybridchat can be embedded within Finesse or a CRM, but is not dependent on Finesse.
  • works on both CCX and CCE, standalone, so you can seamlessly migrate from one version to the other without changing your setup on chat, chatbots or chat channels.
  • is part of the CIM framework which is built to apply AI not only to chat but also to voice and other channels.
  • as part of CIM allows you to combine chat and voice, video and screenshare in the same conversation.
  • supports rich messaging, such as carousels, cards, buttons, geolocation
  • provides hybrid chat with bots

Sequential or parallel bots

Hybridchat allows you to use multiple Chat Bots in parallel or in sequence, allowing you to quickly adapt to your requirments.

  • Exchange bots while maintaining your NLU training data
  • Use certain bots for certain domains (small talk, address change, order fulfilment, tracking).
  • Use bots in sequence, in particular for message filtering (SPAM, blacklists, abusive language, data loss prevention, two-factor authentication 2FA, PCI-DSS compliance)

Skill based routing or pull routing

Hybridchat can use push-routing, routing as provided by a callcenter, or pull-routing if you only have occasional chat requests.

Messaging fees

Expertflow doesn't charge anything on a per-message base, and for channels such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, Telegram and the like these are completely free of costs. For SMS providers, you can use the lowest-cost option available in your country - for example for SMS in the US with Signalwire, receiving SMS is free, and sending SMS is .0013 USD - in other countries an SMPP connection to your local operator is often the lowest-cost option.

For Whatsapp business messages, and other than the Template message fees payable to Facebook we provide a fixed-price package with unlimited session messages - so if you have more than 4 agents, you'll be saving money.

Hybrid chat can integrate with message aggregators such as Twilio, Messagebird, Vonage, Infobip, Plivo and the like and has ready-made connector to these platforms. Such platforms typically charge 0.005 cts per message sent/ received, which for a full-time agent (8hs per day * 25 days per month *120 messages per hour in either direction*0.005 cts per message) can result in a monthly cost per agent of 120 USD per agent to these aggregators.

You can freely choose from the messaging channel and switch from one to the next - you are not locked into any messaging provider.

Hardware Requirements

*Upto 50 concurrent agents

vCPUvRAMHDD
Hybrid Chat Core4 cores4 GB50 GB
Hybrid Chat Core with Rasa8 cores12 GB150 GB
Hybrid Chat Core with Knowledge base8 cores12 GB150 GB
Software Requirements
OSLinux CentOS7

Documentation, Userguides, and Developer API's

Here is our technical documentations. This includes API's to integrate Bots, chat channels and contact centers.

  • Subscription to the bot framework of your choice, if you would like to have Hybrid chat
  • If you would like a customer profile to pops up on the agent side when he takes over a chat, a CRM connector from Expertflow
  • Docker Container with MongoDB
  • Expertflow Professional Services for integrations to chat channels and to configure the Bot/ AI solutions
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