Overview
A Playvox WFM inbound workactivity integration provides Playvox WFM with information about customer contacts and agent activities. There are a number of sets of information that may be provided in this way:
- Agent status (task data) - this provides a timeline of agent activity, and is predominantly used to track real time adherence, as well as providing insights into current status along with historical analysis of time spent in different activities.
- Contacts - the key attributes of a customer or external party contact. This is predominantly used as an input into realtime analysis, historical reporting, and forecasting.
- Workstreams - workstreams represent a conversation or enquiry that encompasses one or more contacts. This may or may not be relevant depending on your service, and your ability to span multiple contacts with a workstream.
- Agent Interactions - The actual work effort / activities that are undertaken related to a workstream or contact in the resolution of the customer enquiry
It is worth noting that Playvox WFM is based around receiving detail level information and not aggregated / summarised forms of this data. We strongly prefer receiving data in near-realtime, as this takes advantage of our realtime capabilities.
In addition there are a number of auxiliary services that may be used to provide additional information including:
- User identifier mappings
- Realtime metrics used to update queue or agent level metrics, such as queue depth / calls waiting etc.
- Workstream / task configurations.
These are not covered within this guide.
Getting Started
Playvox WFM provides REST endpoints to allow the submission of work activity data. These endpoints are secured, and require an Authorization bearer token to be provided. The authorisation endpoint is to obtain a to be used in subsequent API calls. See Getting started with the API for more information.
Agent Status
The task data API is used to publish agent status changes as a timeline of events. Each change in status should be posted as an individual event. The task data API is described in WorkActivity (Task Data). Task data is used for realtime adherence tracking, along with metrics on schedule activities.
The agent status as reflected in task data is normally representative of the high level activities that an agent may be scheduled for. For example in the following view:
The first line here represents the scheduled activities, and the second line the actuals - as tracked through the task data. In this example we would expect to see status change similar to:
- 22:00 - Chat
- 22:45 - Break
- 00:05 - Voice
- .....
- 08:31 - logout
Volumes and Contact Interactions
See Workstream Data (v2) for some more description of these concepts. This information is used to create views on actual volumes for forecasting and realtime views, as well as agent handle times / interactions for performance and realtime tracking.
Workstream
A workstream is a customer conversation through its lifecycle through to resolution. It is normally created through an initiating contact. This endpoint allows workstreams to be created and updated as a workstream progress from initial creation, through first response, first resolution, through to completion. The workstream API is described in Workstream Data (v2). A workstream can also be created directly from a Contact, if the lifecycle of the workstream is based entirely on a single contact.
Contact
Every unique customer contact can be submitted through the Contacts endpoint. This is used to capture key contact attributes such as the timestamps, durations, and outcomes of a customer or external contact. Ideally contact information should be sent as soon as it is available, and may be sent and updated using a unique identifier. The contacts API is described in Workstream Data / Contacts. A contact can be best related to a unique customer call or chat, which may span multiple call legs, or chat engagements.
Interaction
Every agent interaction with a contact or workstream can be submitted through the interactions endpoint. This is typically every call leg (for a voice contact), chat engagement, or interaction with a message, ticket, or other contact. Interactions contain the key timestamps, along with agent interaction metrics such as talk time, wrap time etc. The interactions represent agent handle time, and will be used for occupancy and related performance metrics. There may also be interactions created for milestone or non-handle time interactions - such as a missed call or chat. The interactions API is described in Workstream Data (v2) / Interactions
Examples
For example, if we had a customer 'Product Support' enquiry that was initiated by an inbound phone call (Contact), with a Zendesk ticket (Workstream) created to track that enquiry. The phone call is taken by agent A (interaction), who then forwards to agent B (interaction). The following diagram depicts a high level view of these entities:
Once that call has completed, the ticket is forward to the product specialist (Agent 3), who creates performs some follow up work:
And then makes an outbound call (contact) to the customer to resolve:
The following image shows how this information comes together in Playvox WFM to create a wholistic view of omni-channel interactions: