We are pleased to announce the latest Buzzeasy release, featuring a new wave of enhancements to Campaign management, supervisor controls, and the agent experience. These improvements aim to provide more valuable insights, streamline operations, and increase overall efficiency. Here are the highlights:

Campaign Management​

Introducing two new columns in the Campaign record listing:

• Last Handling Name: Supervisors now have visibility into the agent who last handled a campaign record. This information is invaluable for reporting, quality assessment, and training purposes.
• Preferred Agent column: This column informs supervisors about the agent assigned to a specific campaign record. It can display "Anyone" if there's no preferred agent or the agent's name, which can be clicked to access their settings and details conveniently opened in a modal.

Additionally, Supervisors can now cancel records that are processing, providing better control over campaign management. If the record is already with an agent, it cannot be cancelled and an error message will be displayed instead.

Supervisor controls​

We enhanced the supervisor and administrative experience with additional controls.

• Disable Recording Controls for Agents: A new option under Portal > Configuration > Voice > Recording default behavior > Allow agents to control recording behavior enables supervisors to prevent agents from discarding or keeping recordings. This ensures compliance with recording policies and avoids unauthorized changes.

• Restricted Numbers: A new menu under the Voice category > Restricted numbers allows users to upload phone numbers that should not be called due to governmental regulations or company policy. The system will prevent agents from dialing restricted numbers via Lookup, Campaigns, or Callback. Inbound scenarios are not affected by the Restricted Numbers list.

Agent experience​

We've enhanced the agent experience as well in this release.

• Scripting for Adhoc Calls/Emails: Scripting now automatically opens for adhoc calls and emails performed through the Lookup feature. This eliminates the need for additional clicks, streamlining the workflow for agents.
• Schedule Callbacks for Myself: Agents can now schedule callbacks for regular conversations, to themselves. By clicking the "Schedule Call" button and selecting "myself," agents can set a target campaign and date/time for automatic reminders to follow up with specific customers.

We now introduce the "reschedule to myself" option for campaigns and callbacks.

Rescheduling campaign and callback records to "myself"​

As part of Campaigns (including Callbacks), agents are already able to reschedule records to be processed at a later time. However, they could not identify themselves as the sole target of these tasks. Effectively targeting "anyone", these tasks undergo a standard queuing process and so any qualified and available agent could receive them.

We now introduce the ability for agents to reschedule campaign/callback records for themselves. In this case, when the scheduled date/time is reached, the system processes the tasks with priority above any other task for the agent and the queuing mechanism is bypassed. Administrators have the option to designate a time period for keeping such tasks associated with this agent. This is available in the Queue Properties tab. If after this period the task is not processed by the agent, the system changes the target to "Anyone", meaning it will be queued to any qualified and available agent.

This feature helps with customer satisfaction and overall efficiency for some contact centers, as it is likely the agent rescheduling a campaign or callback record is actually the most qualified to handle it at the designated time as well.

In this release we continue to add enhancements to our Campaigns structured outbound calling services.

Adaptive Campaign record queuing​

We fine-tuned the way Buzzeasy queues records of a campaign, based on the number of skilled agents logged in. Upon starting a campaign, we take somewhat more records then this figure (~110%) and keep on queuing this many as agents process and close them, until the campaign is stopped. Buzzeasy makes sure the number of queued items is continuously meeting this figure. This is in contrast to the previous behavior, where we queued the records at fixed intervals.

The system evaluates the number of skilled agents logged in with a 2-minutes frequency in each campaign, which means that if this number changes while the campaign is running, then the change will be reflected in 2 minutes. This however does not affect the instantaneousness of queuing the records.

The change means campaign records are processed way faster and qualified agents are kept more busy with these tasks.

Campaign specific historical reporting details​

We added a dedicated data table in our historical data feed for campaigns. Details such as the followings are now available:

• Percentage of processed records

• Record metrics such as summary of overall talk time, ring time, time spent in various states, etc.

Other improvements​

• Custom Customer data fields are now available in the Workflow's Switch node for decision making.

• Agents can now dial a new customer without having to fill out their details and save them first into the customer database, thus greatly speeding up their ad-hoc dialing experience in such cases.

We continue to enhance Campaigns, Agent Workspaces, and release a host of quality of life improvements.

Campaign record management improvements​

Creation time filter​

The campaign contact record list can now be filtered based on the creation time of those records (effectively the time they were uploaded). For more persistent campaigns where supervisors might perform multiple upload sessions on a routinely basis, this becomes an effective tool to zoom in on the set of records of interest.

Canceling records​

Supervisors can now cancel contact records for example to avoid processing them for whatever business reason.

Agent workspace features​

Override Wrap-up timer​

Administrators wishing to control how much time agents spend wrapping up their admin work after each conversation already can specify wrap-up timers on a tenant-level. In larger tenants, with more than one type of business workflow this might not be ideal for all teams. Therefore Buzzeasy now offers the ability to override this tenant level setting on an Agent Workspace level. Agent Workspaces are a set of Buzzeasy configurations concerning inbound and outbound workloads – they help organizations better finetune Buzzeasy services to the various different business scenarios in their contact centers. With the wrap-up timer now duplicated into the Agent Workspaces, administrators can now override the global (tenant) level setting, matching the need of the various agent groups.

Override hold music​

Similar to the wrap-up timer, now the hold music feature can be defined in the Agent Workspaces as well, overriding the tenant level property. This means inbound and outbound calls served by different agents can now play different hold audio (playing separate on-hold announcements).

Other updates​

• Voice announcement bundles can now be deleted from the portal.
• In case voice calls are transferred to external consultants, the historical datafeed now contains their phone numbers.

This release brings another round of new features to Campaigns, Callbacks, the Agent Workspaces among others.

Campaign and callback updates​

Agents to schedule callbacks any time​

Agents can already reschedule a preview outbound campaign task to a later time. Now they can do the same outside of campaigns while engaged in an inbound or an ad-hoc outbound conversation, or even during lookup. Instead of marking a deadline in a separate calendar or a piece of paper, this feature helps agents to accomplish this on the spot, any time – saving time and energy.

Controlling campaign dial attempts​

Agents can dial a customer from a campaign task on multiple occasions in various circumstances (e.g. redialing or rescheduling) using one or more phone numbers. Doing this too many times however might frustrate some customers, so Buzzeasy now allows optional limits on these.

Limit task dial attempts​

A new Campaign property Limit task dial attempts was introduced for administrators to designate a total number of dial attempts from a campaign record in the scope of a single task. This way agents handling such a task will only ever be able to dial and redial the same customer (potentially across multiple phone numbers) up to this limit, thus avoiding customer nuisance.

Limit campaign record reschedules​

Rescheduling a campaign task will close the current one and open a new one at the designated time, therefore the above task dial limit will get reset. To maintain control on the number of calls, Buzzeasy also introduces the Limit campaign record reschedules optional feature. With this, agents will only be able to reschedule a campaign record up to this number of times.

Campaign record retention time​

In order to decrease clutter, Buzzeasy starts to purge "finished" campaign records when they reach 14 days old. We consider a campaign record "finished" when they gain either Completed, Failed, Auto-cancelled or Cancelled states.

Customer data updates​

The following enhancements are available with regards to our Customer Profile database.

Supervisors to edit custom fields​

Supervisors could already expand the customer database schema with custom fields, but now they can also see and edit the contents of these. This allows closer control on the customer database.

New customers in business units of the conversation​

New customer records created by the agents will automatically be associated to the Business Unit of the inbound conversation (Channel), or the Agent Workspace for outbound and lookup scenarios.

Agent Workspace updates​

The following Agent Workspace related enhancements are made available in this release.

Default outbound channels​

Agent Workspaces can now optionally designate a default email or voice channel for outbound. This benefits the agents during Lookup and ad-hoc outbound scenarios as they do not need to spend time selecting the same channels over and over again.

This feature is available in Agent Workspaces > Lookup Settings.

The Allow agents to select option retains the previous behavior, and is the default.

Display during lookup​

The new Display during lookup option allows Supervisors to designate which Agent Workspace is going to be listed for the agents. This again benefits agents as they will have shorter lists to select items from before being able to initiate an ad-hoc outbound conversation.

This feature is available in Agent Workspaces > Lookup Settings.

Historical datafeed updates​

We present the following OData schema updates in this release.

• Added the channel's email address for email conversations to better identify the business context.
• Added the SMS channels into the channel lookup table.

Further updates and bugfixes​

• Completion code lists now gain a vertical scrollbar on the portal in case the list does not fit the screen.
• Activity History filter now contains the SMS media type.