Features and Enhancements

Master/ slave licensing enables aggregation of licensing across multiple dialer servers.

For details, see Master/ Slave Licensing

Historically, provisioning standalone and multi-tenant installations of Softdial Contact Center™ involved some outage for a tenant while services were configured. In V10.2, various changes have been made to facilitate zero-downtime configuration. These are:

1. dynamic provisioning and configuration of tenants and tenant services.
2. enabling tenants to administer their own namespace. The tenant-specific namespace configuration is now accessible via Softdial Campaign Manager™ Client.
3. support for dynamic configuration change. Most administration functions supported dynamic update. V10.2 addresses the 2 functions that did not. This means that:
   • it is now possible to add, delete and edit queues in real-time.
   • landlord users can add and delete incoming call routes in real-time.
4. Softdial Scripter™ 2 now supports dynamic configuration of scripts, agent scripts may be updated 'on the fly'.

Version 10.2 includes the first release of the Softdial Management Console. The management console is implemented using the facilities of Softdial Scripter™ and presents a web-based UI for common supervisor tasks. These tasks include:

1. reassigning agents to alternative campaigns
2. monitoring / coaching / barge-in to an agent session
3. campaign job management (starting/ stopping campaigns)
4. changing script configuration
5. IVR agent allocation

Routing based on skill group has been a function of Sytel's ACD since inception. In version 10.2, support for skills-based routing is built in to outbound campaigns. Queue selection for dialled numbers can either be determined by the customer database, or with multiple call list support each list can be assigned to a particular queue.

Queue logic is as per inbound ACD with multiple overflows. The only constraint is that resources can only be drawn from agents logged in to the campaign.

Depending on application or legislative constraints, outbound skills-based routing queues can either overflow to the entire pool for the outbound campaign or can be abandoned.

For more details, see Skills Based Routing (Outbound).

The major change to Softdial Campaign Manager™ is support for multiple call lists. This is implemented as master/ slave campaigns, allowing different retry management schemes to be set for each list type. See Linked Campaigns.

Other changes to Softdial Campaign Manager™ include:

• Improved filter selection
  Filters can be set up in a template and then applied on-the-fly to modify list selection criteria.
• Dynamic Do-Not-Call list support
  Agent dispositions can be used to register the call as do-not-call for the campaign or the tenant.
• Addition of a call completion timestamp in the campaign database.

Softdial Contact Center™ V10.2 introduces Softdial Publisher. Publisher is a data transformation and data publishing engine based on the XML standard. This provides the basis for delivering data feeds for third-party applications, custom web services interfaces and XML-based access to MIS data. It also provides the foundations for Sytel's new Softdial Reporter™ 2 module.

For more details, see Softdial Publisher™.

Softdial Reporter™ 2 is a reporting suite that enables both historical and real-time data to be reported on in a single view. It provides enhanced versions of the realtime viewers delivered in previous versions of Softdial Contact Center™.

For more details, see Softdial Reporter™ 2.

V10.2 also introduces support for Sytel Media Server, Sytel's host based call control and media processing platform. This software only IP telephony solution provides all of the functionality previously delivered using dedicated hardware telephony cards in a scalable and inexpensive form.

For more details, see Sytel Media Server

Third-party TTS support is now accessible via SAPI. Softdial Telephony Gateway™ can be configured to use any SAPI 5 compliant TTS engine.

For more details, see Text To Speech.

In order to facilitate custom media types (chat protocols, e-mail, SMS gateways), V10.2 introduces a workflow engine that drives transactions through Softdial CallGem™. The workflow engine works in conjunction with Softdial Scripter™ 2 to extend the Softdial CallGem™ session model to deliver queues for other media types.

For example, it is possible to define an Inbound campaign to monitor a POP mailbox, and then have agents log on to the campaign via Softdial Scripter™ to process the e-mail in a well-defined manner. The astute reader will realise that this also facilitates automated workflow tasks.

The workflow server implements a plug-in API which is published to enable third-party media interfaces to be supported. Workflow server ships with basic inbound and outbound transaction generators for simple workflow processes, and a POP3 interface to facilitate inbound e-mail handling.

For more details, see Softdial Workflow Server™.

Alert Monitor provides a detail configuration interface to enable event responses to be scripted in detail. The responses can be either:

1. pop a tooltip
2. pop the Alert Monitor
3. run an external command (e.g. sendmail)
4. send a message to Softdial CallGem™ (e.g. launch a workflow process)

For more details, see Alert Monitor.

Encryption of DTMF digits - DTMF data logged is encrypted using a reversible proprietary algorithm.