Document toolboxDocument toolbox

.Solution Reference v13.2


This document is a technical solution description of CIM providing brief details on the product features and architecture with all necessary solution prerequisites

Introduction

Customer Interaction Manager (CIM) acts as a single repository to store customer interactions. It receives and retains all interactions of a customer with the call center for tracking a 360-degree view of a customer journey. It provides interfaces to capture real-time and historical information for callers/customers. Administrators can define and extend the contents of the customer and request objects, attaching fields and information to them as per their requirements.

Business Features

Customer Profile & Screen Popup

In CIM, a person approaching the contact center for a query through any channel is a Customer.  The 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 automatically 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, it provides the agent with the interface to 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.


  • At a time, 100,000 customer records can be imported via CSV.
  • The bulk import operation should only be performed in off-peak hours. 
  • CIM currently only supports up to 50 custom attributes
  • Two customers with the same ANI/phone cannot exist. Each customer in CIM is supposed to have a unique Phone number. A phone number can be duplicated among all phone numbers of a single customer but cannot be duplicated across different customers. 
  • If a new customer record with a different name but with the same existing phone number is created, the existing customer profile will be overwritten/replaced with the new customer profile.

Interactions

CIM stores customer's interactions as they interact with the Cisco call center. This includes both IVR, agent-based voice 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 based on the conversation with the customer. 

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. 

ANIThe 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 of the interaction bar shows the total duration while the duration for each individual activity is also shown under the activity details
Call TypeShows 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 TypeThis 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

This shows the ID of the agent who handled the call.

Team NameShows 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. 

  • In the case of call transfer, the interaction context is not transferred yet. This also means that if the agent A has changed the link of the active interaction to a different customer based on his conversation with the customer, the Agent B to whom Agent A had transferred the call, won't be able to see the updated customer link. 
  • If an agent applies multiple wrap-ups during a call, the most recently applied wrap-up will be recorded at the end of the call.
  • At the moment, the application does not store any barge in, consult and silent monitoring call legs or activities as part of the customer interaction. However, it stores call conference, call transfer activities as part of the interaction.


Click-to-dial call

Agents can manually initiate a call to a customer while viewing their profile.  

Outbound calls are also stored as the customer's interaction history and available to the agent for subsequent interactions.  

  • Manual Outbound calls are initiated through Finesse. So the user must have to be on Finesse to use this feature.
  • Screen popup does not happen in the case of dialing a call manually
  • Automatic Screen popups work in case of campaign outbound calls

Click-to-SMS

Agents can also manually initiate an SMS to a customer while viewing their profile.

Extend Customer Object Schema 

Add custom attributes to the Customer object based on your business needs. 

System administrators or users with an “Admin” role can extend the schema of the Customer. The user can add as many as 50 customized attributes to store information of their customers 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 affect the order in which the fields are shown in the Customer Profile View.  

Workflow

Solution Architecture

Deployment Models

Solution Security

Solution Prerequisites