Customers
In CIM, each contact approaching a person approaching the contact center for a query through any channel is stored as a customer Customer. The administrator can extend the customer object and add attributes to identify and manage customer data. It also allows to upload new customer records and update existing records based on new interactions happening.
Customer Profile Update Pane
The Contacts List allows users to view and manage customer profiles with or without having an active call.
Without an active call, the user can search a customer profile in the Contacts List based on one of his phone number, First name or Last name to view or update the customer profile.
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Interactions
On the Interaction History view, agents can see the recent past interactions of the customer he's handling. This way agents can handle the current interaction knowing the complete history or background, drill down each interaction, view details and the post-interaction treatments/ comments.
Agents can also filter interactions associated tagged with a certain request to track the customer journey in a particular customer context.
Interaction Details Pane
A contact center voice call interaction can further combine multiple activities such as an inbound call with two activities i) the IVR activity for the time spent in the IVR ii) the transferred -to-agent activity (if the customer opted to talk to an agent). Similarly, it is also possible to have more than one agents (each with a separate call activity) handling the same customer interaction.
The following details of a customer interaction are available:
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Field
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Description
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ANI
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This shows the customer’s phone number from which the call was received
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Calling Date and Call Duration
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This shows the total call duration and the on which the call was received.
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Call Wrap up
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This is the Finesse Wrap-up provided by the agent/s who handled the call.
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Agent ID
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The shows the ID of the agent who handled the call.
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Call Type
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This shows the type of the call. It can assume the following values:
INBOUND: Simple inbound call.
OUTBOUND: The manual outbound made by the agent or supervisor to the customer
Transfer: This the call leg which got transferred to another agent or supervisor
Conference: This shows that the call was converted to a Conference call with multiple agents
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Team
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This shows the name of the team the agent belongs to
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Start Time
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This shows the time when the call was landed on the Finesse desktop
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Recording player integration
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This is shown when EF Voice Recording Solution is also purchased. In that case, each call that is stored in CIM as a customer interaction will also display the call recording along with the interaction record.
Note that this is available only for CCE customers at the moment.
Requests
A customer interaction can optionally be tagged with a certain request. A request identifies the context of the interaction and carries the description of why a customer called in. For instance, a call can be an information request call, a work order to process or anything. CIM administrators can extend the Request object and introduce additional types of requests that a business needs to process.
An agent can open a new request or can also choose one of the existing opened requests to link the current interaction with that request.
There are some system-defined fields for a request as follows:
Request Title: This contains the title of the request and is a mandatory field
Description: This is an optional field, containing a brief description of the request
Request Type: Administrators can define their own request types. Based on a request type, users can then also define other custom attributes particular to a specific request type. While opening a new type of request, the appropriate request fields are shown based on the selected request type.
Status: A request can have only two status values:
Active: Representing that the request is opened. New interactions can be linked with an existing, active request.
Closed: Users of CIM can later also choose to close a request. Any new interaction cannot be linked to a closed request.
Create a New Request
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Using the CIM gadget, agents and supervisors can also make an outbound call to any customer. To make a call, an agent first needs to search the customer from the “Contacts” list and open its record. In the Interaction History View, the agent will see a phone icon on the top right of the gadget to make a call beside the name of the customer.
Making an outbound call
A list of all five phone numbers will appear (if exist) as shown in the screenshot below. Select the desired number from the list and make sure that the agent is in the “Not ready” state to initiate the call.
Once a call is received and connected, it will be recorded in CIM as an OUTBOUND customer interaction as shown in the screenshot below.
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This feature is NOT available for administrators, that is, administrators cannot make an outbound call to the customer from the admin application. Instead, they have to have a supervisor or an agent credentials and log on to the Finesse gadget to make a call to the customer. |
Multi-legged call
This type of call happens if there is more than one agent that has handled the call i.e in case of a transferred or conference call.
Transferred Call
When a call is transferred from one agent to another agent, two call legs are formed, one for each individual agent. For instance, the screenshot below shows that the first call leg having the type “INBOUND” was first landed to the agent “shabber” and was later transferred to another agent “hassan1” having the call type as “TRANSFER”.
It should also be noted that each leg will have its own wrap-up applied by the agent who handled the call leg. However, if the second agent doesn't apply any wrap-up to the second call leg, the same wrap-up applied by the first agent (to the first call leg) will also be stored for the second call leg.
Also, in this case, if both of the two agents associate the ongoing interaction with two different requests, the interaction will finally be linked with the request that the second agent selects (hence, overwriting the changes made by the first agent).
Conference call
Similar to Call Transfer, multiple call legs are formed in case of a Conference call since there could be two or more agents involved in the same call. For instance, the screenshot below shows that the first call leg having the type “INBOUND” was first landed to the agent “shabber” and was later transferred to another agent “hassan1” having the call type as “CONFERENCE”.
In this case, again, the call will have two wrap-ups, each applied by the individual agent for each individual call leg. The principle of application of wrap-ups and the association of the interaction with a request is the same as it is for the Transferred call.
Configuration Interface
Only the system administrators or users with an “Admin” role can make changes to the configurations.
Customize Customer Schema
This allows business administrators to add custom attributes to store any business-specific information for their customers. These additional user-defined fields are available to agents/supervisors while creating new customer profiles.
To start adding the new fields in the “Customer” object, click on the “ADD FIELD” button. While defining new fields, the user will need to select the following:
Label: Provide a name or label to the field.
Type: Select the type of input the field should expect. Currently, the application supports the following types of inputs:
Text: This could be any text value
Numeric: This expects any positive integer
Phone: This expects the phone number of the customer in the format, +123123123123 with validation of up to 14 characters (min 3 to and max 14).
Email: This expects an email address in the format abc@example.com
Required: Turn the flag ON to mark a field as a required field. Keep it OFF for optional fields.
Click on the “tick” icon to save the new field.
Please note that some of the system-defined fields already exist in the schema. Those fields are:
First Name: The first name of the customer
Last Name: The last name of the customer
Phone 01-Phone 05: These fields store up to five phone numbers for a particular customer.
Email: The email address of the customer
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While uploading contacts in bulk through CSV files, users can only upload data for the system-defined fields only. To add data for custom fields, the user needs to enter this manually through the application once the bulk upload operation is complete. |
Customize Request Schema
The “Request Schema” defines the type of information that should be stored while opening customer requests. Agents and supervisors will be able to see the type and the number of request fields in the CIM Finesse gadget based on the fields admins define under the “Request Schema” from the CIM Configurations.
The user first needs to define the customized request types for the field “Type”. These request types are then used to group further sub-fields based on each individual request type. For instance, for a request type “complaint”, the business may require to take "device" or "model number" against which to open the complaint. Similarly, for a different type of request such as “Sales”, the business may need to define the desired service or package that the customer would like to subscribe to.
To add a new request type, the user needs to type in, the name of the request type and press ‘Enter’ key to add it into the system. The same step is repeated to add more request types.
To start adding custom fields in the “Request” object, click the “ADD FIELD” button. While adding new request fields, provide the following information:
Label: Provide a name or label to the field,
Type: Choose the input type from this dropdown. Following type of inputs are supported at the moment:
AlphaNum15: This accepts an alphanumeric input for up to 15 characters.
AlphaNum50: This accepts an alphanumeric input for up to 50 characters.
Email: This accepts the Email input in the form of an email.
Phone: This accepts the phone number in the form of number format.
DateTime: This accepts the DateTime input in an alphanumeric format.
Time: This accepts the time input in an alphanumeric format.
Duration: This accepts the Duration input in an alphanumeric format.
Text: This accepts the text input in the form of text.
Type of request: Choose by clicking on the pencil icon that which “Type” of request this field should belong to. Based on the type of requests, the appropriate request fields are then visible to agents, supervisors while filling out the Request form. At least one type must be defined under the Request Schema.
Required: Set this flag to mark a field as a required field.
Click the tick icon to save the newly-added fields.
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This settings icon is present only on the admin portal to manage CIM configurations and not available for agents/supervisors on the Finesse gadget. This means that if any user has to manage these configurations, he’ll have to log on separately to the admin portal.
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schema of the Customer object is extendable so in addition to some predefined attributes, an administrator can also add more custom attributes based on their business needs. This helps to define what data each company would like to store for its customers. Customer attributes with the following data types can be defined:
- Text: This could be any string up to 1000 characters long.
- Phone: This is to store any additional phone numbers of the customer
- Email: This stores the Email ID
- Date: This could be any data of type Date.
- DateTime: This could be any data of type DateTime.
- URL: This could be any data of type URL.
- Bool: This could be any data of type Bool. This can correspond to any flag which is either set to 'true' or 'false'.
Authorized users can upload and manage customer profiles. Customer profiles can also be imported in bulk using CSV files.
When a customer call lands on Cisco Finesse, the CIM application looks up the customer profile based on the ANI and pops up the right profile in front of the agent (if the customer already exists). If it does not find any matching record, the agent can create a new profile itself for the customer on call.
CIM also exposes APIs for third-party applications to read and push data from/to CIM. So the agents can avoid switching screens between the CRM and Finesse desktop to view the complete customer profile while dealing with the customer call.
All customer records are listed on the Customers List page with filtering, sorting, searching capabilities.
With the Customer list, you can:
- Drag n drop columns to reorganize the list view. Each column here represents one attribute in Customer schema.
- Sort the customer list (ascending/descending) based on any column by clicking on the ascending/descending arrow icons. By default, the list is sorted based on the creation date of the record in descending order; i.e. the latest created being on the top.
- Page-wise navigation with the page index of the current page
- Resize columns, change the width according to the view preferences
- Column search. Search based on multiple columns is not yet available.
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Interactions
CIM stores customer's interactions as they interact with the Cisco call center. This includes both IVR and agent-based interactions. Therefore, each time when the customer calls in, the CIM agent gadget is automatically loaded with the customer's profile and its previous interaction history. At the end of the active call, the call is automatically linked to the already popped up customer profile. However, agents also have the capability to change the association and link the call to another, most appropriate customer if the need be.
This way, while dealing with the customer, agents become fully aware of the customer's recent interactions and see why and how repeatedly, the customer had called in the past.
Each interaction is made up of smaller units, called Activities. A CIM activity could be:
- An IVR leg in a parent call
- An agent-transferred call leg (this includes IVR- Agent, Agent-Agent transfer)
- Wrap-up added by agents to a call
On the Interaction History gadget, you can expand to view all activities tied together in an interaction.
The following details are available on the interaction history view:
Field | Description |
Customer Profile | Lists the complete profile of the customer in a collapsible mode |
DateTime | This shows the date when the call was received while individual times in each activity shows the start time of the activity. |
| ANI | The phone number of the customer from/to which the call was received/ initiated |
Call Wrap up(s) | Finesse Wrap-ups provided by each agent in the call. |
| Duration | The duration on the interaction bar shows the total duration while the duration for each individual activity is also shown under the activity details |
| Call Type | Shows with an arrow if the call was INBOUND or OUTBOUND. The arrow direction is inward to show an inbound call and outward to show an outbound call. |
| Interaction Type | This shows, "Finesse" in case if the call includes all agent activities; i.e. if the call was transferred to an agent. Shows "IVR" if the call includes IVR activity only. |
Agent ID | The shows the ID of the agent who handled the call. |
| Team Name | Shows the name of the team to which the agent belongs |
| Agent Extension | Shows the extension of the agent under details of the Agent Activity |
Start Time | This shows the time when the call was landed on the Finesse desktop |
CIM also exposes APIs for third-parties to push an interaction to CIM.
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Click-to-dial call
While viewing a customer's profile, agents can also initiate a call to the customer.
Outbound calls are also stored as the customer's interaction history and available to the agent for subsequent interactions.
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Outbound calls are initiated through Finesse. So the user must have to be on Finesse to use this feature. |
Attribute Schema
Only the system administrators or users with an “Admin” role can make changes to the Customer schema.
The user can add as many as 50 customized attributes based on the needs of the business.
The attributes in the schema can also be re-ordered to change the order of the display. The order changes from here affects the order in which the fields are shown under Customer Profile View.