Toni Milushev, Author at Perficient Blogs

PACE New Features: Video and Screen Sharing, New Microsoft Teams Integrations, and More!

Toni Milushev — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 14:30:38 +0000

Perficient’s Amazon Connect Experience (PACE) solution amplifies the power of Amazon Connect with several added features and managed services. As we continue to develop and customize our software to your needs, we will post blogs with new features and processes we have added, changed, or fixed. To learn more about PACE, visit our dedicated landing page or view our listing on the AWS Marketplace!

Video and Screen Sharing:

Are you looking for a solution that seamlessly enables video and screen sharing for your contact center? Look no further. PACE now supports video and screen sharing out of the box. Customers can request that agents escalate chat conversations to virtual meetings that enable video and screen sharing. In addition, agents can proactively escalate active chat conversations to virtual meetings. Regardless of who triggers the escalation, agents and customers can talk to each other, see each other, and even share their screens.

Microsoft Teams Outbound Chat:

Earlier this year, we announced the first native Microsoft Teams chatbot for Amazon Connect, enabling Teams users to seamlessly message contact center agents. With this release, contact center agents can now trigger outbound chats to Teams users while taking advantage of other PACE features such as canned responses. Best of all, supervisors can gain valuable insights into these interactions by reviewing them in the PACE real-time dashboards and historical reports.

Microsoft Teams Status Sync:

PACE already enables agents to sync their Microsoft Teams statuses to Amazon Connect. Now, we also allow agents to sync their Amazon Connect statuses to Microsoft Teams, resulting in bi-directional sync between the two platforms. This innovative approach will increase productivity and reduce unwanted interruptions for agents who are Microsoft Teams users.

To help administrators manage this new functionality, we’ve added support for configuring which Microsoft Teams activities will prevent agents from being available for contact center interactions and which PACE activities will set agents to busy in Microsoft Teams. In addition, administrators will be able to better manage the underlying integration with enhancements such as the secret expiration indicator.

And There is More!

This release improves the underlying Dashboard, Lambda, and WebSocket frameworks for enhanced stability and cost savings. It enables supervisors to configure Microsoft Teams status syncing on a per-agent basis and adds retention policies for voicemails and 3rd party links. PACE also now supports rich text for both Canned Responses and Web Chat, as well as automatic email responses configured to proactively acknowledge your customer’s messages.

But we didn’t stop there. Agents will no longer be confused by seeing the Canned Responses tab on contacts that don’t support that functionality, and they will have a better experience when handling emails. Also, administrators will better understand PACE contact flows with the newly improved descriptions. Last but not least, we made multiple enhancements to the following pages on the Administrative Console:

Integrations (Teams)
Integrations (SMS)
Prompts Manager

Learn More

We’re an Amazon Connect Service Delivery Partner with more than 20 years of experience delivering customer engagement solutions. We offer unparalleled contact center experience to accelerate innovation with AWS and Amazon Connect. In addition, our cloud expertise enables us to create powerful solutions while maintaining business agility and flexibility, while our dedicated CRM and ERP practices ensure seamless integrations with legacy applications.

To learn more about what our experts are doing when it comes to customer engagement solutions and Amazon Connect and to get in touch with our team, visit our thought leadership hub!

PACE New Features: Email Routing, Queue Voicemail, and More!

Toni Milushev — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 19:52:06 +0000

Email Routing:

Prepare to ditch your email tools because out-of-the-box email routing for Amazon Connect is now generally available with PACE! This new addition to our ever-growing list of channels brings agents the seamless experience of handling email interactions directly from the PACE Agent Console. Now, agents can view email threads, respond with rich text, and send file attachments. At the same time, supervisors can review metrics associated with the interactions in historical reports and real-time dashboards. So with just a few configurations, your contact center can now leverage customizable email flows and skill-based routing to get your customers’ emails to the right agents!

Queue Voicemail:

We have expanded our voicemail options to now include Queue Voicemail in addition to Agent Voicemail! Offering callers the opportunity to leave voicemails is particularly useful when queue wait times are long or when no agents are available in a queue. Once a queue voicemail is recorded, PACE leverages skill-based routing to route the task to the appropriate agent to guarantee the best customer experience. Using the PACE Agent Console, the agent can listen to the voicemail, review its transcript, and directly call back the number with a click of a button.

And There is More!

One of our customers’ favorite features is the Contact Path Tab which displays how a caller navigated through the contact flow (IVR). We have now updated the tab’s functionality to show paths for tasks such as email and voicemail, in addition to the existing functionality for calls and chats. We have also improved the underlying performance of this feature.

Changes We’ve Made:

With this release, we enhanced the Queue Live View dashboard to display channel information, making it even easier to see which agents are handling what type of interactions. We also updated our underlying services to the latest versions and made multiple enhancements to the following pages:

Integrations
Reporting Configuration
User Management

Learn More

To learn more about what our experts are doing when it comes to customer engagement solutions and Amazon Connect and to get in touch with our team, visit our thought leadership hub!

Perficient Releases Retail Starter Pack for Twilio Flex

Toni Milushev — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 16:53:47 +0000

Establishing and executing your customer-first promise can have an extreme impact on the customer experience, retail brand loyalty, and repeat business. However, to remain competitive you must continuously improve productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction to achieve long-term goals.

Enabling your teams with easy and efficient ways to interact with customers can be expensive. Off-the-shelf solutions often provide unwanted functionality or are cost prohibitive while building a custom solutions takes too long and is extremely costly.

Twilio Flex’s agile approach to contact center solutions offers your retail agents the channels, integration capabilities, and features that are needed to equip them for success. To help you get started, Perficient has released a Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack.

Deliver Your Customer-First Promise with The Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack

Our Twilio Flex Retail Starter Pack provides only the functionality your teams need to do their job, right of the the box. It also integrates seamlessly with SendGrid for email routing, and Glance for co-browsing and video capabilities.

Once the retail Starter Pack is implemented and configured, you can take advantage of serval added channels, integrations, and features including:

Channels

Email routing with SendGrid
Web chat
Voice
Video (chat to video escalations)
Twitter (direct messages and mentions)
SMS (inbound and outbound)

Integrations

Shipment tracking (UPS, FedEx, USPS)
Co-browsing with Glance

Features

Callbacks
Voicemail
Reason/disposition codes
Web chat nudge behavior
Canned responses
Emoji picker

How Long do Implementations Normally Take?

implementation time varies in duration from two weeks to several months, depending on the required scope of customizations and integrations. The starter pack also lays the foundation for the future updates.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities visit us on our Twilio partner page!

PACE New Features: Queue Live View Dashboard, Customizable Roles and Permissions, and More!

Toni Milushev — Tue, 31 May 2022 15:29:02 +0000

Queue Live View Dashboard:

The Queue Live View Dashboard is here! Many of our customers requested this new dashboard template that allows them to see who is waiting in a queue so they can determine if a VIP caller has been waiting too long. Supervisors can use the Queue Live View Dashboard to see the phone numbers or usernames of customers in a queue and how long each person has been waiting. Additionally, we added an Active Contacts view that allows supervisors to determine who their agents are actively servicing and for how long, which will enable supervisors to determine if an agent is stuck on a difficult call.

Customizable Roles and Permissions:

We have expanded the PACE user management system to support custom roles and permissions. Administrators can now create tailored permissions that map to typical roles in a contact center. For example, Administrators can create custom roles for Supervisors that limit their access to the Agent Console and specific Dashboards, as usually Supervisors should not make changes to the underlying points of integrations. This level of granularity allows for more control over who can perform specific tasks and is a must-have feature for all contact center platforms.

And There is More!

In this release, we continued our focus on building the best out-of-the-box Real-Time Dashboard solution. We optimized real-time dashboards for scalability and added support for channel-specific reporting, which will come in particularly handy when creating custom reports for channels such as SMS. In addition, we improved the underlying security for dashboards and incorporated best practices for real-time data retention. Lastly, we enhanced some of the Contact Center Overview Dashboard metrics.

But this is not all! We are happy to announce that PACE now officially supports Google SSO as an identity provider.

Learn More

To learn more about what our experts are doing when it comes to customer engagement solutions and Amazon Connect and to get in touch with our team, visit our thought leadership hub!

PACE New Features: Inbound & Outbound SMS, Dynamic Agent Experience, and More!

Toni Milushev — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 19:59:03 +0000

SMS Messaging:

We expanded our supported list of channels to include inbound and outbound SMS! With this out-of-the-box integration, customers can text message with self-service contact flows and connect with agents if they require additional assistance. In addition, we have extended this functionality to allow customers to transition from voice interactions to SMS interactions when the call queue wait times are too long.

With outbound SMS, agents can perform customer outreach campaigns directly from the PACE Agent Console. This feature is also handy when an agent needs to summarize the details of a voice conversation for future customer reference. For example, while the agent speaks with a customer about a new shipping number for their order, the agent can now easily text the shipping number to the customer.

Dynamic Agent Experience:

Many platforms advertise customizable agent desktops, but PACE takes that to the next level! Our agent experience is now more dynamic than ever, with the ability to enable different applications based on the queues the agent is interacting with. For example, a call from the Support queue will enable the Ticket Creation application. On the other hand, a chat from the Sales queue will allow the agent to process a payment through the Payment application.

And There is More!

As promised in our last release, we continue to expand our real-time out-of-the-box dashboard templates. Supervisors can now see an overview of the contact center’s performance by looking at the Contact Center Overview dashboard and review queue-specific details using the Queue Overview dashboard. We also fulfilled our promise to expand the types of branded Web Chat interactive messages that we support to include a list picker with images and a time picker.

But this is not all! We now support file attachments for agents and Teams users on Microsoft Teams Chatbot interactions. In addition, the PACE version number is now viewable on the Administrative Console to help administrators determine what features are available on their deployments since we release features so quickly.

Changes We’ve Made:

In this release, we improved the underlying security for integrations and resolved a minor issue with the automatic chat translations language selector on the Web Chat widget. We also made minor changes to make the buttons on the Call Me Now, and Web Chat widgets have solid backgrounds. Plus, we alphabetically ordered the menu items on the Administrative Console and made multiple enhancements to the following pages:

Agent Console (Configure Queue Metrics)
Agent Console Settings
Agent Extensions
External Contacts
Lex Bot Management
Prompts Management

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!

Perficient Releases Help Desk Starter Pack for Twilio Flex

Toni Milushev — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 20:46:59 +0000

Help desks are often the first point of contact for both customers and employees seeking support, a solution to a problem, workflow guidance, and more. Providing your teams with efficient and user-friendly ways to interact with those in need of support is expensive. Off-the-shelf solutions often provide unwanted functionality and are cost-prohibitive. On the other hand, building custom solutions takes too long and is extremely costly. This is where Perficient can help.

Optimize and Accelerate Your Twilio Flex Help Desk Capabilities

Our Twilio Flex Help Desk Starter Pack provides the out-of-the-box functionality your teams need to do their job, without all the things they don’t need. It also provides integrations with ZenDesk and ServiceNow for computer-telephone integrations (CTI), automatic ticket lookup, and integration with Glance for co-browsing and video capabilities.

Once the starter pack has been implemented and configured, your Twilio flex implementation will have several added channels, integrations, and features including:

Channels

Email routing with SendGrid
Webchat
Voice

Integrations

ZenDesk
ServiceNow

Features

Glance screen sharing
File attachments
Callbacks and voicemails
Reasons/dispositions codes

How Long do Implementations Normally Take?

Basic implementations take two weeks, with customized implementations available and varying in length depending on the scope of customizations and integrations required. This starter pack lays the foundation for future feature implementations, optimizing your contact center on Twilio Flex.

Why Perficient?

PACE New Features: Microsoft Teams Chatbot, Real-Time Dashboards, and More!

Toni Milushev — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 11:55:52 +0000

Microsoft Teams Chatbot:

The first native Microsoft Teams chatbot for Amazon Connect is here! Our team has been hard at work developing this native Amazon Connect chatbot for Microsoft Teams that allows Teams users to interact seamlessly with contact center agents. Our new chatbot also supports Lex bot interactions to enable AI self-service options directly within Microsoft Teams. The best part of our integration is that the agent experience does not change; ultimately, this allows agents to manage all incoming customer conversations across voice, web chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Microsoft Teams!

Real-Time Dashboards:

In our last release, we enabled the building of real-time custom dashboards. In this release, we expand the available contact center metrics for custom dashboards and bring two out-of-the-box dashboard templates to help you get started even quicker:

Agent Dashboard – The Agent Dashboard allows supervisors to see their agents’ daily performance and provides an at-glance chart for supervisors to determine if additional staff is needed.
Contacts Dashboard – The Contacts Dashboard enables supervisors to drill down into the day’s dispositions (categories) for contacts and survey responses.

This is just the beginning of our dashboard template offerings. Be on the lookout for the Contact Center Overview and Queue Overview dashboards in the next release.

And There is More!

Businesses continuously aim to improve their customers’ experiences, including their web chat interactions. For that reason, our low-code web chat widget now supports branded interactive messages that allow customers to select from a list of options with the click of a button. In addition, our web chat now has advanced customization capabilities that enable it to match the branding of your website no matter the website’s complexity. In our next release, we will expand the list of supported interactive messages to include a time picker and a list picker with images.

Changes We’ve Made:

In this release, we improved the underlying Customer Profiles and Wisdom integrations resulting in better performance of the PACE Agent Console. Plus, we added enhancements to the following pages on the Administrative Console:

Agent Console Settings
Agent Extensions
External Contacts
Lex Bot Management
Reporting Configuration
Third-Party Integrations
Web Chat Management

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!

PACE New Features: Facebook and Instagram Messaging, Customizable Dashboards, and More!

Toni Milushev — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 13:23:14 +0000

Facebook and Instagram Messaging:

PACE now supports Facebook and Instagram as inbound messaging channels! This brand-new integration allows agents to directly handle customer interactions from both Meta platforms for a seamless customer experience. In addition, you can now configure Lex bots to provide your social media customers with self-service options, which will increase customer satisfaction. This integration marks the beginning of our planned expansion of channels for this year. Stay tuned for the upcoming announcements on Email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more!

Customizable Dashboards:

Contact center data is a valuable asset that helps contact center managers decide how to improve day-to-day operations and increase customer satisfaction. However, that can be difficult to do with raw data absent of meaningful context. For that reason, we are now enabling managers to build customizable dashboards and view them directly in PACE. The dashboards can be configured with multiple visualizations to provide managers with the insights that matter most in driving change.

New Web Chat Customizations:

We are excited to announce that our low-code webchat widget can now be placed anywhere on your pages using the new positioning configurations. In addition, we expanded customization options for the message box, start button, and survey interactions. However, we understand that having so many customization options can become overwhelming. For that reason, we also added the ability to preview the widget before it has been published, and standardized multiple configurations, such as the icon sizes.

And There is More!

If you find it as difficult as we do to configure Quick Connects for internal agent transfers, then you will appreciate the new “PACE Internal Transfers” contact flow. This new pre-built contact flow allows your agents to transfer calls to each other based on pre-configured extensions. We have also added support for multiple direct inward dialing scenarios that are described in greater detail here: Direct Inward Dialing (DID) for Internal Agent Transfer with Amazon Connect

Changes We’ve Made:

This latest PACE release also includes multiple changes and optimizations. First, we integrated the Voicemail UI technology, significantly improving performance and stability, and we optimized the caching mechanism on the Closed Message Management page. Next, we reduced the PACE deployment time by over 60% and updated our backend frameworks, such as Log4j, to the latest versions. Finally, we also added pre-built alerts for all PACE contact flows and improved our logging technology.

Below are a few more items we added and improved:

New localization configurations for the Agent Console Dashboard
New validation for Slot Names on the Intents Management page
Improved Canned Responses formatting and disabled Canned Responses for voice interactions
Improved Lex Bot processing of multi-language inputs
Updated Calling Options dropdown on the Call Me Now Widget
Updated breadcrumbs for the Translation Terminology page

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!

PACE New Features: Sentiment Analysis, Scheduled Reports, and More!

Toni Milushev — Mon, 27 Dec 2021 15:02:22 +0000

Sentiment Analysis:

The new Sentiment Analysis Tab provides insight into the positive, negative, or neutral attitude of the caller as the call progresses and offers next-best-action recommendations based on pre-configured rules. In this tab, agents can view turn-by-turn transcripts and sentiment data along with an overall sentiment score for the interaction. This lessens the need for agents to take notes during calls and enables agents to focus on providing positive customer interactions.

Scheduled Reports:

Contact Center supervisors and managers can now get the data they need when they need it by configuring reports to be automatically emailed to them. This essential functionality helps managers and supervisors use timely data to determine how their agents are performing and to plan for staffing requirements. In addition, this out-of-the-box feature allows reports to be emailed to multiple people and distribution groups, which makes it perfect for regularly sharing information with an entire team.

And There is More!

We extended the ability to configure embedded applications as Static Tabs on the Agent Console. Static Tabs display even when agents are not handling an active contact. This functionality further increases agents’ productivity by allowing them to respond to tickets, review knowledge base articles, and interact with embedded applications without leaving PACE.

Changes We’ve Made:

As of this release, Administrators no longer have to manually manage their queue hours when configuring Closed Messages for queues in PACE. The benefits of configuring Closed Messages are described in detail in the following blog: A Better Experience for End-of-Day Callers in Amazon Connect

We also revamped the underlying contact management mechanism to improve the overall performance of the Agent Console and resolved some edge case scenarios. In addition, we changed the External Transfers tab on the Agent Console to improve the agent experience when transferring calls from Amazon Connect to Microsoft Teams.

Last but not least, we made multiple enhancements to the following administrative pages:

External Contacts
Hour Overwrites Manger
Holiday Management
Status Alerts
Update Contact

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!

PACE New Features: Wisdom, Agent Status Reminders, and More!

Toni Milushev — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 18:28:07 +0000

Wisdom Integration:

Wisdom is a new feature released by AWS that uses real-time speech analytics and natural language processing to provide agents with recommendations and answers based on the customer’s issues. These capabilities are a game-changer for the contact center space since they increase agents’ efficiency and reduce average handle time. Best of all, it’s available out of the box with PACE, and works flawlessly!

Agent Status Reminders:

With this update, supervisors can configure custom status reminders to assist agents in managing their time. The reminders are configured on a per status basis and display custom messages to agents who need to take a break after being Available for too long or switch back to handling contact center interactions. For example, agents can use the custom lunch status to indicate when they are away for their 30-minute break. Supervisors can now configure reminders to trigger after 35 minutes and 45 minutes for agents who forget to switch back to the Available status after their 30-minute lunch.

And There is More!

We understand agents are very busy during the day and sometimes handle multiple conversations simultaneously, making it particularly difficult to remember to set notes and dispositions (categories) during wrap-up. For that reason, we added the ability to retroactively update these fields using our Update Contact feature. Now, agents can look up the Contact ID they wish to update and enter the required information whenever they are available.

In addition, we made the Agent Console more extensible than ever by adding the ability to have static tabs that will display even when agents are not handling an active contact. We also updated the Customer Profiles integration to version 2, which provides an enhanced UI and new functionality such as the ability to copy the Contact ID of a previous conversation.

Changes We’ve Made:

One of the most significant changes in this release is the new autoload functionality of the Contact Path Tab that displays how a customer navigated through the contact flow (IVR). We also improved the overall performance of the Agent Console, and Lex Bots Manager, resulting in a smoother platform experience for both administrators and agents. Last, but not least, we made enhancements to the External Contacts and Home pages on the Admin Console.

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!

PACE New Features: Microsoft Teams Transfers, Canned Responses, and More!

Toni Milushev — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 17:01:22 +0000

External Contacts:

Now, agents can transfer calls to Microsoft Teams Users and contacts outside of the contact center with the click of a button. External Contacts are easier to manage than Quick Connects and offer a tagging feature that allows your contacts to be categorized and searched for by area of expertise, department, or any other preferred category. In addition, because agents can see the statuses of all external contacts that are MS Teams users, they can determine who is available to answer the call.

Canned Responses:

You asked, we listened!

Agents can now quickly send standard responses to customers in chats or view pre-configured responses during calls to help with consistency in messaging. Canned Responses can be configured into categories, and each response can be tagged to help your agents quickly search and locate the desired response.

And There is More!

We understand that incorporating AI and Machine Learning into your contact center can be an overwhelming task. Therefore, we continue to make it as easy as possible to build custom Bots by enabling you to configure and manage recognizable inputs called slots using our Bots Manager.

In addition, we added conversation dividers for Web Chat interactions so your customers can easily identify the beginning of a new conversation within the same Web Chat widget.

Changes We’ve Made:

We have integrated the underlying UI technology to provide you with a single, centralized place to access both the Administrative Console and the Agent Console, significantly improving the performance and stability of PACE. Also, we improved the underlying caching mechanism for an even better performance.

Last but not least, we improved the following administrative pages:

Call Me Now
Dispositions
Prompts
Web Chat

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!

PACE New Features: Microsoft Teams Integration, Call Me Now Widget, and More!

Toni Milushev — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 22:09:32 +0000

Microsoft Teams Integration:

Our first of many upcoming Microsoft Teams features is here! Agents can now sync their Microsoft Teams statuses to PACE in near real-time using our new Microsoft Teams integration.

We are excited to announce this feature as it paves the way for us to expand the integration with additional functionality such as transfers to Teams Users, a Teams Chatbot, and more.

Call Me Now Widget:

Say hello to our new, easy-to-deploy widget!

The Call Me Now widget provides an additional way for your customers to get in contact with you. Customizable widgets can be easily created and deployed across your websites to improve customer satisfaction, decrease average handle time, and optimize contact center costs.

PACE Data Connector:

We have made custom reporting in Amazon Connect more effortless than ever with the PACE Data Connector. Out of the box, PACE now delivers CTR (Contact Trace Record) and Agent Event data directly into a network storage location (S3 bucket), which can be used by data analysis platforms such as PowerBi, Splunk, and more to generate custom dashboards and reports. We will soon expand this functionality to provide out-of-the-box real-time dashboards for supervisors.

And There is More!

With this release, we began the rollout of our user management system for PACE. Now, administrators can assign two separate roles to users:

Admin – Users with this role can make configuration changes on the PACE Admin Console
Agent – Users with this role can access the PACE Agent Console

Stay tuned for future updates on the user management system, as we expand its functionality to support custom roles and permissions.

Last but not least, we added two additional features to our webchat widget:

Customers can now download their webchat conversations at any point using the new download transcript button.
Administrators can now use the translation language manager to easily enable/disable languages for automating translations on a per widget basis.

Changes We’ve Made:

We deprecated the now-outdated paneled agent console experience and increased the number of Queue metrics agents can see from five to ten.

We continue to listen to our customers! Based on their feedback, we improved the underlying agent attributes framework to hide attributes by default and removed unnecessary branding on the web chat widget. In addition, we improved the end chat experience and now allow for customers to respond to surveys even when they initiate the end of a conversation.

Learn More

To learn more and get in touch with our customer engagement practice, visit our Customer Engagement webpage!