ExpertFlow Campaign Manager (ECM) allows businesses to run automated outbound campaigns with multiple channels, including voice and SMS to keep in contact with the customer base, for purposes such as to send periodic billing reminders/ appointment reminders, announce product/services promotions, making callbacks to follow up. The web-based administration offers contact center managers to schedule campaigns for particular hours of a day, days of the week, pause an active campaign or resume a stopped campaign with a toggle button and define the call rescheduling strategies based on business policies and call outcomes (for instance, send an SMS on phone 02 if phone 01 is ‘busy’). The solution works on top of Cisco contact center and leverages on the dialing capabilities of Cisco Outbound for dialing calls. It then syncs call results from the Outbound system with ECM for it to apply rescheduling call strategies based on call results.
Business Features
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, or call the customers 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 all “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 about this.
However, this is not vice versa for the moment. That is, an SMS campaign can not be converted to 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.
However, once the life cycle of a customer is closed within the campaign (i.e. all strategy attempts completed), you must upload customer data through CSV files to the campaign to make calls to customers once again.
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.
Note:
If the strategy is configured for Phone 1 and Phone 2, the customer numbers must also be provided for the two phone fields.
If the optional "Phone" field is left empty while uploading the customer file, the attempts configured for phone 2 will also be made on Phone 1.
Upload Campaign Contacts
You can upload contacts in ECM using the following ways:
Using the application’s web interface
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 be more than 40 characters. |
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 applications such as Siebel, MS Dynamics. See 15500720.
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 15500720to learn more about this field. |
Phone 2 | The secondary, optional phone number of the contact. See 15500720 to learn more about this field. |
Phone 3 | The third, optional phone number of the contact. See 15500720 to learn more about this field. |
Phone 4 | The fourth, optional phone number of the contact. See 15500720 to learn more about this field. |
Phone 5 | The fifth, optional phone number of the contact. See 15500720 to learn more about this field. |
Request State | This is the current state of the contact in the ECM database. |
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 15500720 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 that have been sent to the dialer. |
Connected | Represents contacts that were dialed and connected successfully with the agents. The calls having this outcome will be assumed as ‘closed’. |
Not Connected | Represents contacts that 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 that were found in the 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 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 | The record status is set to Dangling if it is not synchronized within a 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. 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 a response from the customer was received. 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 these REST APIs, administrators can create and manage outbound voice campaigns, pause/resume a campaign, and upload a list of contacts for dialing, all from inside their CRM. For a complete list of API functions, please refer to ECM API 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. Additional PS is charged for updating of call results to the CRM.
Integration with Agent Call Scripter/Agent Guidance
If the ExpertFlow Agent Guidance module is purchased, clients can also design call scripts or conversational guides for agents to record customer feedback while making outbound calls. It works such that each ECM campaign has its own conversational script or a questionnaire that opens up as a Finesse gadget while answering a campaign call.
This especially helps in scenarios where call center agents need to record 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.
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 few standard reports for ECM campaigns within CUIC.
The reports are developed on top of the ECM database and should NOT be compared with those of the stock reports available from the Cisco Dialer.