Voice campaigns
Run automated, IVR or Agent-based campaigns to quickly contact your customers to give them a reminder alert, promote a new service or package, conduct a survey or call them back as a result of a dropped call.
SMS campaigns
Run standalone SMS campaigns to broadcast a message to a list of customers. In case of running an SMS campaign, the campaign type should be set to “None”. Select the “Default” strategy or create your own customized call strategy having “SMS attempts” for the SMS campaign. See more about Call Strategies below.
Multi-channel campaigns
A voice campaign can also switch to ‘SMS’ at any time during a contact’s lifespan in the campaign. For instance, you can choose to send an SMS to a customer if his phone comes ‘Busy’ as a result of the first Voice attempt. See Call Strategies to learn more on this.
However, this is not vice versa for the moment. That is, an SMS campaign can not be converged to run as a Voice campaign. This also implies that an SMS campaign should always contain SMS attempts in the campaign strategy.
Campaign Schedule
Campaign schedule allows administrators to control campaign execution based on the defined hours of a day, days of the week. This is useful when you need to define a campaign once and have it running repeatedly during specified timings, on specific days of the week and avoid running it on other days.
Start/Stop a Campaign
Using a toggle switch, a campaign can be started or stopped at any time.
If a campaign is disabled or stopped, no further calls are queued to Cisco Dialer. However, the contacts that were already pushed would be dialed.
If the user resumes an already stopped campaign, the dialing starts based on the specified, scheduled time.
Call Strategies
Call strategies determine how to contact a customer and what to do if the customer does not respond in the first attempt. With this, the user can select:
The preferred channel to contact the customer, i.e. Voice or SMS
Phone number to contact the customer out of a list of five phones (optionally)
The decision as to how many times a customer should be contacted depends upon the number of attempts configured in the call strategy. One can set Voice call strategies for the following dialer Outcomes:
Busy: Dialer returns this when a Busy tone is detected against the customer’s phone
No Answer: Dialer returns this when customer’s phone returns ‘No Answer’
Abandoned: This is returned in case if the call got abandoned by the customer
Others: This category groups all non-connected types of dialer outcomes other than the ones mentioned above such as Fax, SIT Tone, Answering Machine Detection.
In addition to voice, administrators can also choose to send an SMS to a customer. In case of SMS attempts, an SMS template must be specified in the campaign configuration. If the sent SMS expires without receiving any response from the customer, the user can choose to make another attempt or close the contact in the database. This is done by setting an expiry time (in minutes) for the message to get expired before it receives any response from the customer.
One strategy can also be shared among multiple ECM campaigns.
Upload Campaign Contacts
You can upload contacts in ECM using the following ways:
Using application’s web interface
Using shared folders
Using RESTful Calls
Using Interface
Application users can upload campaign contacts through a .CSV/.Txt file from the web application.
The comma separated CSV file should follow the following format to upload contacts:
Field | Description |
Phone 1 | The primary phone number of the contact. This number can be 28 characters long and must be a valid phone number. This is mandatory and must be specified. |
Phone 2 | The secondary, optional phone number of the contact. This number can be 28 characters long and must be a valid phone number. This is optional and can be left as is. Add comma alone if this field needs to be left empty. |
Phone 3 | The third, optional phone number of the contact. This number can be 28 characters long and must be a valid phone number. This is optional and can be left as is. Add comma alone if this field needs to be left empty. |
Phone 4 | The fourth, optional phone number of the contact. This number can be 28 characters long and must be a valid phone number. This is optional and can be left as is. Add comma alone if this field needs to be left empty. |
Phone 5 | The fifth, optional phone number of the contact. This number can be 28 characters long and must be a valid phone number. This is optional and can be left as is. Add comma alone if this field needs to be left empty. |
Business Parameter 1-12 | These parameters can contain any custom value for a particular customer contact such as Account Type, Customer Email. The length of the data in these parameters can be defined as per the integration specifications locked with ExpertFlow. The length of each of these parameters cannot exceed 255 more than characters. |
Using Shared folders
With this approach, the .CSV file is supposed to be placed by the client on some external location. The machine credentials and the shared folder path should be entered in the system settings to let the application automatically read files on the location. ECM checks for new files on the shared location in periodic intervals, automatically imports contacts from the file and places it in an archived directory to keep maintain the read files history.
Using RESTful APIs
ECM also exposes REST-based APIs to upload a CSV file in the API call. The API takes ECM Campaign and the file to be uploaded as input parameters and imports the contacts within the file into the database.
These APIs are especially helpful while doing campaign management from third-party CRM application such as Siebel, MS Dynamics. See Integration with CRM.
View Contacts Status
For each ECM campaign, administrators can view the current status of contacts in the ECM database.
Details of the report columns are described in the table below:
Field | Description |
Phone 1 | The primary phone number of the contact. See Upload Contacts to learn more about this field. |
Phone 2 | The secondary, optional phone number of the contact. See Upload Contacts to learn more about this field. |
Phone 3 | The third, optional phone number of the contact. See Upload Contacts to learn more about this field. |
Phone 4 | The fourth, optional phone number of the contact. See Upload Contacts to learn more about this field. |
Phone 5 | The fifth, optional phone number of the contact. See Upload Contacts to learn more about this field. |
Request State | This is the current state of the contact in the ECM database. The possible request states are described below. |
Request Time | This is the time of the last attempt made to the contact by the application. |
Cisco Campaign ID | This is the campaign ID of the Cisco campaign which is associated with this ECM campaign. |
Number To Call | This is the current number from the list of five phone numbers on which the current attempt should be made. (Voice or SMS) |
Business Parameter 1-12 | These parameters can contain any custom value for a particular customer contact such as Account Type, Customer Email. See Upload Contacts to learn more about these fields. |
The administrator can customize this view to see or hide the desired fields such as only Phone 1 to phone 5, Request time and Number To Call.
The list shows all contacts uploaded in a campaign with the Request State column updated. This field can assume one of the following values:
Field | Description |
Pending | Represents contacts which are yet pending and have not been sent to the dialer. |
Sent to Dialer | Represents contacts which have been sent to the dialer. |
Connected | Represents contacts which were dialed and connected successfully with the agents. The calls having this outcome will be assumed as ‘closed’. |
Not Connected | Represents contacts which were dialed but not connected successfully. The calls having this outcome are ‘closed’ as per the call strategy defined. |
Retries Completed | Represents the contacts for which all the retry attempts have been completed without any success to connect with the customer. The calls having this outcome are assumed to be ‘closed’ since all attempts have been expired. |
DNC Listed | Represents contacts which were found in DNC list and were marked as DNC. |
SMS sent and Closed | Represents contacts to whom an SMS was sent and the contact got closed, without any check on if the client responded. |
SMS sent | Represents contacts to whom an SMS was sent and and no response was received till yet from the customer. Contacts who are in this state will not be closed till the time a response is received or another attempt is made, based on the specified SMS expiry time and the delay interval to be given before retrying. |
Dangling | A record status is set to Dangling if it is not synchronized within specified time from CCE/CCX, i.e it has been sent to the dialer but the call result is not fetched within that time due to any reason. Time is specified in config file of back-end services. No further action will be performed on such a record so it would be assumed as closed. |
SMS responded | Represents contacts to whom an SMS was sent and they successfully responded to the message. After receiving the response, the contact would be closed in the database. |
Integration with CRM
ECM exposes REST-based APIs for granting control of campaign management from within the third-party CRM applications (such as Oracle Siebel, MS Dynamics CRM). Via this REST APIs, administrators can create and manage outbound voice campaigns, pause/resume a campaign, and upload a list of contacts for dialing from inside the CRM. For a complete list of API functions, please refer to ECM Developer Guide.
Call results for campaign calls can also be uploaded to the CRM application using interfaces (normally WSDLs) provided by the client’s CRM team. The reporting on campaigns can then be made available from the CRM application as well (provided that the client’s CRM application provides such reporting interfaces).
Note:
This is not available out of the box unless mentioned explicitly. Lock the specifications with ExpertFlow account manager if ECM has to be integrated with the CRM. The client organizations can choose to either purchase ExpertFlow professional services to implement CRM integration using ECM APIs OR delegate this to their own CRM teams.
Note:
An additional CRM consultation fee can also be added if the client wants ExpertFlow to handle the CRM side as well.
Integration with Agent Call Scripter/Agent Guidance
If ExpertFlow Agent Guidance module is purchased, clients can also design call scripts or conversational guides for agents to record customer feedback while taking outbound calls. It works such that each ECM campaign has its own conversational script or a questionnaire which opens up as a Finesse gadget while answering a campaign call.
This especially helps in scenarios where call center agents need to record the customer feedback while doing outbound campaigns. For instance, agents registering a new purchase order for a customer interested in the new product/service launch, or agents filling out a survey questionnaire based on the customer feedback about company products and services.
Pause/resume campaigns based on filters
Users can also choose to pause or resume a campaign at any time with a toggle button on the admin interface. Clients can also choose to pause/resume a campaign based on certain filters using APIs. For instance, stop an active campaign in a certain district and keep it running in the other districts.
Maximum active campaign limitation
Contrary to UCCX Outbound, there are no limitations as such in ECM on the maximum number of campaigns being active at a point in time. That means, any number of campaigns can remain active at any point in time.
Automatic contacts import
With shared folders, clients can share campaign CSV files with ECM which allows ECM to automatically import the files from the shared location, into the database for dialing. For each file being read by the system, an archived or history file also exist in another archive directory to keep maintain the history.
LIFO dialing (Last_In_First_Out)
Clients can also choose to dial contacts in Last_In_First_Out manner where the contacts uploaded in the last are dialed first by the dialer.
Do-Not-Call List (DNC)
The DNC list contains the phone numbers which should not be dialed for outbound campaigns. Usually, the customers who do not wish to be contacted by the organizations are added in the system as DNC contacts.
ECM scrubs the uploaded list of campaign contacts against the list of DNC before dialing the phone number. So if a contact exists in the DNC, the contact will not be dialed out.
Note that this DNC list is a global list and is applicable to all campaigns created in ECM. The individual, campaign-level DNC is not yet available.
Campaign Reports
ExpertFlow provides basic campaign reports within CUIC. The report templates can also be shared separately.