Voice contact center setup

This article will help you to create a simple voice contact center with SmartQueue (ACDv2) technology.

All inbound and outbound tasks, such as phone calls and IM chats, get into a queue before an agent receives them. You can create one or several queues for different purposes.

To create a queue:

1. Log into your control panel.
2. Create an application or choose an existing one.
3. Go to the SmartQueue section.
4. On the Queues tab, click the Create queue button.
5. In the opened window, specify the queue's name, the queue's priority, and settings: Agent selection strategy, Task selection strategy, Maximum queue size, Maximum waiting time. Note that the settings for calls queue and IM chats queue are different.

If you already have existing agents, you can bind agents to the queue at this step, or you can bind them later.

6. After you click the Create button, your queue is ready.

You need at least one agent to process a queue.

Agents are application users which can process inbound and outbound calls and IM chats from the queues. To process the queue tasks, an agent needs to be bound to this queue.

To create an agent and bind them to a queue:

1. Log into your control panel.
2. Create an application or choose an existing one.
3. Go to the SmartQueue section.
4. On the Agents tab, click the Add agent button.
5. In the opened window, specify the agent's username, display name and password.

At this step, you can bind the new agent to an existing queue in the Bind to a queue field. Optionally, you can assign one or several skills to the agent.

6. After you click the Create button, your agent is ready.

You can delete and edit agents on the Agents tab. At the right of each agent in the agents list there is the edit and delete buttons.

You can specify skills for different agents and distribute tasks only to agents who posess a certain skill.

For example, you have a skill called "Knows Italian", and attach this skill to all the agents that know the Italian language, and set up skill levels for each agent according to their language level.

To read more about skills and learn how to use them, see this article.

An agent's workspace is a software environment in which an agent makes or receives calls. You can use any SDK to create an agent's workplace. Read more about different SDKs and their initialization here.

In this article there is an example on how to use Web SDK.

When you initialize the SDK, pass the queueType parameter with SmartQueue type.

Then you need to implement all the necessary instruments for your agent to use. This depends on your case.

As a minimum setup for an audio calls agent, you need:

To learn how to process an inbound call, see this guide. As a minimum, you need to implement buttons to answer a call and decline a call.

The most important part here is the agent's status. To make and accept calls, the agent should have the tool to change the status to "Ready".

What is a SmartQueue status

SmartQueue distributes the calls according to the agents' statuses. Here are all possible statuses:

The statuses change in a special order that cannot be changed. For example, you cannot skip AfterService status after the call or skip Ready status to accept a call.

On the following chart, you can find all the status transitions possible. Red lines mean that status change happens automatically and you cannot choose the status manually.

How to set an agent's status

To set a status, use the setOperatorACDStatus method. You can make a function that accepts one of the possible statuses and changes it. Here is an example for Web SDK:

For example, you can create a dropdown list on your webpage, and bind the setStatus function from the code above to a button.

Custom statuses

You can set up up to 10 custom statuses and give them customized names. The custom statuses work in the DND mode. You can use custom statuses to provide more detailed agent statistics and time tracking.

You can appoint a custom name to the following statuses: CUSTOM_1, CUSTOM_2, CUSTOM_3, CUSTOM_4, CUSTOM_5, CUSTOM_6, CUSTOM_7, CUSTOM_8, CUSTOM_9, CUSTOM_10.

To appoint a name to a custom status, use the SQ_SetAgentCustomStatusMapping method. Specify the custom status in the sq_status_name field and the customized name in the custom_status_name field. You need to specify your account ID in the account_id field, your API key in the api_key field, and your application ID in the application_id field.

To check the currently appointed names, use the SQ_GetAgentCustomStatusMapping method. You need to specify your account ID in the account_id field, your API key in the api_key field, and your application ID in the application_id field.

To delete a currently appointed custom status name, use the SQ_DeleteAgentCustomStatusMapping method. You need to specify your account ID in the account_id field, your API key in the api_key field, and your application ID in the application_id field.

To assign a custom status to an agent, pass the custom status number to the setOperatorACDStatus method. Do not pass the customized name to this method.

To find more information about VoxEngine scenarios and how to create them, see this guide.

For a contact center, the main goal in the VoxEngine scenario is to process inbound or outbound tasks and put them in a SmartQueue. You can set up different routing rules to put different calls or implement your own logic how you want to distribute tasks between queues.

To put an task in a queue, use the enqueueTask event.

In this scenario example, you can see how to enqueue an inbound/outbound call into a SmartQueue:

After you implement all of the above, you should have a fully working queue for processing inbound and outbound tasks and an agent's workspace where your agent can change the status and accept calls.