Computer Telephony Integration, or CTI, is a technology that allows a phone system to connect to computer programs such as CRM. Linking the call and caller data, today's contact centers take advantage of CTI to gain several benefits.

A CTI helps organizations gain a 360-degree view of the customer, personalize each customer-agent interaction, cut down call handling time, boost agent efficiency and performance, and ultimately maximize the customer experience.

A CTI connector primarily acts as a logical network element or a back-to-back user agent (B2BUA) in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), that remains as a pass-through in the call signaling path to intercept SIP messages for other endpoints and third party capabilities that help organizations use extended call control functionalities. When the CTI connector runs, it checks the use-cti parameter value to determine how the call is mapped.

Perhaps, a CTI connector is a short-term solution for a long-term problem. But, in a rapid digital transformation embarked by enterprises who wish to preserve their investment in telephony equipment, it is an integration of choice for companies to quickly boost the efficiency and productivity from the CTI connection, via newfound automation capabilities, such as click-to-call, and screen pops based on the caller ID of an incoming call and enhanced visibility into agent activities.

Servion is a leading CX specialist and system integrator who can offer "out-of-the-box," custom-built, inexpensive and easy-to-deploy CTI connectors for enterprises to preserve the status quo maintaining their existing on-premise telephony equipment, and customer management platforms, used by different teams with strict business goals and mandates.

Servion has built several such custom-built and easy-to-deploy CTI connectors for our global clients. We are glad to share three success stories to demonstrate how Servion helped clients overcome the data problem with CTI connectors.

Success Story 1

This is the story of the fifth-largest bank in the US, headquartered in Minnesota with over 74,000 employees, serving millions of customers across the country with a diverse mix of financial services that include consumer and business banking, corporate and commercial banking, payment services and wealth management and investment services. The client improved agent-supervisor engagement with Servion’s WFM Connector, by connecting AVAYA POM and Nice WFM for better workforce management.

Requirement

The bank was looking for an effective connector to integrate the newly updated Avaya Proactive Outreach Manager platform (POM) with its NICE Workforce Engagement Management for efficient staffing and RPA needs. The bank migrated from the traditional Avaya Proactive Contact Solution dialer to the latest POM, who does not directly interface to pass the critical agent/state/call data to Nice WFM. The requirement was to build an interface on AVAYA POM to fetch data and send it to Nice WFM for MIS and workforce predictions.

Solution

With a “Build Once Deploy Many” approach, Servion built a robust, scalable end-to-end connector, that seamlessly ensures the data integration between AVAYA POM and Nice WFM.

The solution included:

• Real-time data integration which enables the connector to capture agent/state/call statistics data from AVAYA POM and sends it to Nice WFM.
• Historical data management: besides the real-time feed of data, the connector can feed the historical data at periodic intervals to Nice WFM as upload files.
• Tools and technologies: The data flow combined cutting-edge tools and techniques including Java, Hibernate, Apache Kafka, AVAYA POM Real-time SDK, Message Queues, MS SQL-Server, XML Stream, and Socket Server.

Business outcomes

With implementing AVAYA POM - Nice WFM connector, the contact center operations in terms of workforce management and customer engagement became more efficient and handy. Servion’s deployment brought about several other operational benefits for the client, including:

• Workforce management and staff forecasting made simple.
• Robust and minimal configurations to fetch the data feed.
• Higher visibility on queues, call status, workload, and agent performance for supervisors never like before.
• Better data integration for better resource and MIS planning.

Success Story 2

The US’ leading cloud contact center is another Servion client who integrated its communication with Avaya Five9 CC Connector. A market leader in Cloud-based Contact Centre Software in the US, the client was looking for a technology partner to integrate its two contact center solutions - Avaya Aura UC and Five9 cloud contact center solution, using a robust and flexible connector, coupled with an interface, which can provide the contact center managers with higher visibility on available agents and present status, for better engagement.

Solution

With a “Build Once Deploy Many” approach, Servion built a robust, scalable end-to-end connector, seamlessly facilitating the data integration between Avaya and Five9.

The solution included:

• Real-time integration between Five9 cloud contact center solution and Avaya Aura UC, enabling the connector to extract and display the agent list, present status, and activities.
• A UI-based admin tool for better configuration of the integration
• Building a UI for the dynamic status of the agents and effective handling of customer queries
• End-to-end customer and L3 support, covering troubleshooting, root cause analysis, etc.

Business outcomes

Servion’s deployment brought about several other operational benefits for the client, including:

• Seamless and faster integration, reducing average handle time (AHT) in handling customer queries
• Higher visibility on agent availability, present status, and activities.
• Increase in first-call resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
• Geographical redundancy and high availability
• Complete control over integration and its configuration

Success Story 3

Our third client in focus is one of the top multinational investment bank and financial services corporations in the world. The third-largest bank in the United States and has over 200 million customer accounts and 214,000 employees in over 160 countries, it improved agent-supervisor engagement with GED-125 Connector, integrating Cisco ICM, Avaya AVP and IVR platforms for better CX.

The client was looking for a simple and efficient connector between Cisco ICM and its third-party voice portal systems - Avaya AVP and IVR platforms. The integration had to include a real-time event data feed, call routing interface, and service control interface, supporting all existing IVR requests and functionalities, failover mechanisms, and protocols such as SIP and H.323.

Solution

A pioneer in Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Engagement Management (CEM) with over two decades of experience, Servion implemented GED-125 Connector to seamlessly integrate Cisco ICM, Avaya AVP, and AEP IVR platforms.

The solution included:

• A robust interconnection between CISCO ICM systems and third-party VXML Voice Portal Systems, using the GED-125 VRU integration model.
• A web-application for the GED connector to provide MPP port information and heartbeat through the socket, and CCXML script to provide configuration information.
• A real-time event data feed, call routing interface, and service control interface, supporting all IVR requests for getting/setting CTI Data, Call Information & Transfer through Servion’s VRU Web Service Module.
• Failover mechanism between Primary and Secondary GED-125 connector modules
• Port Availability Status of Avaya MPP to Cisco ICM
• 323 and SIP protocol support

Business outcomes

Servion’s GED-125 Connector brought about several key benefits for the client, including:

• Ability to use the existing Avaya IVR yet integrated with Cisco ICM.
• Complete abstraction from IVR, providing web services for IVR functionalities.
• Extended dial plan supports up to 15 digits.
• Highly secure and two-way SSL and third-party certificates.
• Ability to support close to 1000 simultaneous sessions and requests per GED-125 connector.
• Default Keep-Alive - Heartbeat module between the VRU Web Service interface and the GED-125 connectors
• Alerting and monitoring with SNMP Traps.