Announcing PureCloud CRM Data Actions Integrations

PureCloud has recently released new integrations that more easily hook into CRM systems, provide a variety of static actions and enable administrators to create custom actions that can act on data in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Zendesk or Salesforce. These integrations are built on a new data action service that lets you leverage CRM data in powerful ways to make routing decisions in your contact center and deliver critical context to your agents.

Key points on the product:

• New data action service integrates with third-party web services and CRM systems through configuration—not code.
• The data action service communicates cloud-to-cloud to public REST APIs.

What Changed and Why

These integrations replace connectors that ran on the PureCloud Bridge server. Previously, you had to install the Bridge in your infrastructure first; if you needed to get data out of your CRM system in a way that PureCloud couldn’t handle, you had to write your own software connecter and install it in your infrastructure next to the Bridge. In short, PureCloud customers had to write their own code to achieve their needs, while maintaining a Bridge appliance on their network. This process was cumbersome, time-consuming, inflexible and anti-cloud. So, we made it better.

Change
A new data action service replaces Bridge connectors (read more about related upcoming deprecations here). This action service communicates with a wide range of JSON-based web services, with several named integrations available to use out of the box. It supports many common authentication mechanisms, if you need to customize services.

          Rationale: PureCloud was previously narrow in the types of CRM systems it hooked in and had limited support for account, contact and case lookups.

Change
We eliminated the concept of a custom field—a single configurable field type that could be named and added to User, Organization or Ticket records. We replaced this with the ability to copy existing actions and modify them to fit your needs.

          Rationale: The new copy functionality improves workflow for ease of use.

Change
The addition of a “Test” option to the action setup page enables you to experiment with configuration changes and verify that things are operating as expected before you publish either an action or a call flow.

          Rationale: Previously, debugging bridge actions required you to perform several tasks that didn’t end up in your call flow, such as adding audio to different paths to see where things were going, having to spend a lot of time on the phone to test your flow and having to do a lot of trial and error with publishing and deleting. Testing your action before you drop it into a flow eliminates all this pain.

Change
The new data action service takes credentials and configuration that you’ve provided, leverages dynamic data from your CRM and then returns the specific information you need. It’s flexible enough to get at any piece of data from Salesforce, for example.

          Rationale: Previously, if out-of-the-box PureCloud integrations didn’t meet your needs, you had to use a generic web services data dip connector and write your own middleware. Adding custom actions, such as creating a new Bridge action or new web service, required you to perform expensive software development.

Change
The new data action service runs outside the customer network—unlike the previous solution, which ran on the Bridge appliance.

          Rationale: The previous information flow hopped through a customer network, down to the Bridge appliance, up through the public API and back. This required unnecessary infrastructure and maintenance on the customer side.

What’s Possible With PureCloud Data Action Integrations

1. Access a service appointment (custom object) within your CRM to confirm the details with a customer in your IVR.
2. Create a new contact record in your CRM from inside your agent script.
3. Get information about the weather where your caller lives and pass it to agents to use as an ice breaker to start a call.
4. Check the PureCloud analytics API to see how many agents are waiting in a queue before having the IVR transfer them.
5. Reset a contact record in a dialer campaign from a call flow based on customer input.

Now, you can achieve all these scenarios using the new PureCloud data actions integrations. Learn more at Help.MyPureCloud.