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As customers accelerate their adoption of new channels, messaging platforms are quickly becoming common business communication tools—and how those messaging platforms are used is shaping customer expectations. Customers want to message your business, and they expect a swift response.
Messaging is increasing in popularity because it removes barriers to communication—no more wait times, no more hold music. In 2018, Genesys has plans to help accelerate your customer engagement strategy by adding support for a variety of messaging channels to the PureCloud solution. Today, we’re excited to launch the first of those channels—short message service (SMS).
Key Points:
- Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) inbound SMS is now available to customers with a PureCloud 3 license
- Like other interaction types, SMS feeds into a unified user interface for a seamless agent experience
- New messaging flows allow for skills-based routing and Interactive Text Response (ITR) routing decisions, based on data from your CRM
- Recording and quality management support for SMS channel
- Support for forecasting and scheduling within built-in workforce management functionality
- Minimal administration enables fast setup of this new channel
- SMS numbers are offered in 31 countries
- Outbound SMS support to 200+ countries
Feature Overview
With this new feature, organizations can provide a phone number to support inbound text notifications. SMS can be sent to long codes and toll-free numbers. An end customer can text this number and communicate with an agent. Yes, we added support for emojis too!
Automatic Call Distribution Routing
SMS messages can be configured to route based on open and closed schedules, skills and other variables. The inbound messaging flow can be informed by data dips that collect information from your CRM and use it to mold menu and routing decisions. Inbound message flows can also be configured to check for specific data in the body of the message and perform routing decisions according to that data.
Seamless Agent Experience
SMS interactions appear and function similarly to chat and email interactions, so agents have a unified experience. Like other interaction types, SMS has standard blind transfer and disconnect controls, canned responses, wrap-up codes, and notes. Agents will also see the context of previous interactions with the end customer within the last 72 hours, enabling continuity of conversation and agent knowledge of historical customer data.
Any message received from the same sender to the same destination within a 72-hour window will be treated as one conversation; the system will attempt to route the SMS conversations to the last agent that handled the SMS (if unavailable, the system will route to the next available agent). After 72 hours of no activity, the conversation will close. If a message from the same sender is received after the 72-hour window, a new conversation will be created in the system and will be routed as such.
Full Workforce Optimization Integration
Full workforce optimization integration for quality monitoring is available for the SMS channel (as it is for other media types), to drive consistency and efficiencies in agent interactions. SMS interactions can be recorded and assigned in quality evaluations. The native WFM solution includes built-in support for SMS, using the data for future forecasting and scheduling.
Analytics and Real-Time Dashboards
The new SMS channel feeds into PureCloud analytics reporting and real-time views. Standard customer engagement metrics include offered, answered, handle time and talk time. Administrators can configure and manage alerts for SMS interactions when a particular metric is outside defined thresholds.
Easy Deployment
An intuitive administrative interface enables easy deployment of the SMS channel—you can add SMS to your contact center in less than 30 minutes!
Learn more about the new SMS text functionality on the PureCloud Resource Center. To enable this feature please contact your designated Customer Success Manager (CSM) or email CloudSales@genesys.com.
