InGenius Blended Agent – the Marriage of Omni-Channel and Open CTI

3 minute read

Upland Admin

The contact center industry is changing. While phone continues to play an important role, customers have an increasing expectation that they’ll be able to contact a company through more than one channel. It’s predicted that the use of other channels besides voice, like messaging and social media, will grow from just 6% last year to 16% by 2019 (Deloitte).

One way to tackle this change is by having agents assigned to each channel – say a voice team, chat team and email team. But for most companies, voice is still the most critical medium, and it’s projected to stay that way. With this type of siloed multi-channel approach, the difference in demand can leave some of your team overworked while others are spending their day watching cat videos. The solution to this is agents who are trained on all channels – phone, email, chat and social, and who can be available where they’re most needed. This might sound like something that’s difficult to implement, but with Salesforce and InGenius blended agent, the process is simple.

InGenius blended agent

Blended agent is something that we’ve been pretty excited about for a while because it’s the future of the contact center. With InGenius blended agent, Salesforce Open CTI and Omni-Channel are brought together to provide a centralized interface that lets each agent share the workload and easily handle multiple channels. When every agent can pick up phone calls and respond to chats, the team is more efficient and customer wait times are reduced, giving the bonus of better customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Agent controls (like agent state), telephony controls (like pick up and transfer), and Omni-Channel controls are all brought into the InGenius user interface right inside Salesforce. It ends up looking like this:

InGenius with Salesforce Omni-Channel

How does blended agent work?

Blended agent can be configured to set limits on what each agent can handle at one time. Let’s say you want agents to be able to handle up to 3 chats at a time, but if they’re on a call, that’s their sole focus. As soon as the rep accepts a call, their agent state will change from Available to Unavailable – a change also reflected in Omni-Channel – and they won’t be given any more chats or emails until they hang up. Because this is controlled through InGenius, the sync happens automatically.

Blended agent also gives reps the option to accept or decline work items. If they’re working on a high-priority chat case, for example, they might want to devote 100% of their time to it instead of working on 2 other chats in tandem.

With InGenius blended agent, Salesforce Omni-Channel and CTI are married together to provide a single consolidated interface that allows your teams to effortlessly manage multiple channels and distribute the workload. The result? Efficient operations and well-serviced customers.

Want to learn more about blended agent? Check out this talk our CEO, Dale Gantous, gave last year at Dreamforce on the topic:

InGenius Blended Agent Video on salesforce.com

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