What is the SoftPhone?
Euphoria has integrated with FreshDesk, an Online cloud-based customer service software providing helpdesk support. This integration allows users the freedom to make and receive calls from within FreshDesk, enabling a single interface experience for support staff.
As the intelligence that the softphone interacts with happens within the Euphoria platform, all analytics and data will be available within the Euphoria Telephone Management System (TMS).
Which functionality the softphone has available is dependent on the extension type a user has.
Extension Types
Enterprise Extension
Designed for power users, who need access to a wide range of features and functionalities, while not quite needing the productivity reporting available to agents. Enterprise extensions cater to a wide audience from receptionists to executive level users.
Key features of Enterprise extensions include the ability to participate in queues and availability features like additional registration, browser phone and find me/follow me, which give the user multiple options for making sure calls get to them wherever they are.
Enterprise extensions also include permission management, which is useful when limiting access to features and data within an organisational hierarchy. Further details of the Enterprise extension type can be found on the Euphoria website.
Agent Extension
For businesses who need to manage the time & attendance, as well as productivity and performance of their teams whether they are working remotely or on-site, irrespective of whether or not they are call centre agents.
More detail of the Agent extension type and its features can be found on the Euphoria website.
Dialler Agent Extension
Adding dialler functionality to an agent extension enables the ability to make a large number of calls within a short period and get an outcome disposition on each call, with scripting to support team members for content that should be included in those calls.
This extension type is useful whether you are doing a marketing campaign, calling clients for information, sales campaigns, or admin teams doing customer service follow-ups, with the outcome management feeding into high-level reporting of the campaign performance.
For more information, visit the Euphoria website.
Features available per extension within Freshdesk:
Use the phone Icon to open the softphone in Freshdesk and access the login page. After providing credentials, the user will be able to choose a phone engine to transport the calls between the
workspace and the server. Two such engines are available, the External Client or WebRTC.
Users on Apple products, Chromebooks and Linux operating systems should use WebRTC. Otherwise, when using Microsoft Windows, the External Client is the recommended option.
Selecting “Auto Register” allows the login page to be skipped on subsequent logins, automatically using the credentials supplied when initially opening the application.
Once logged in, the softphone phone will allow users to experience different features depending on their extension type:
Enterprise Extensions
- Call tab: This can be used to dial a number manually or used to navigate an IVR menu
- Answer button: For use when receiving calls.
- Dial/Call button: To initiate a call either to another extension or to an outbound number.
In call features:
- Hold: Used to put a caller on hold, for example, to ask a colleague for assistance, as well as to make an attended transfer.
- Mute: Which will silence input.
- Volume Control Slider: Will adjust the volume.
- Transfer calls: To transfer the call to other parties. A call can be transferred to an internal destination, like a colleague or an external one, such as a mobile phone. Click on the Transfer button and dial the number to transfer to. During a transfer, there are two options:
- An unattended or Blind transfer: This is when the call is transferred without speaking to the intended recipient first.
- An Attended Transfer: This allows the user to speak to the recipient before transferring the caller.
- Conference calls: To add multiple lines to a single call.
- When creating a conference call, press the call tab and dial an additional recipient. Once the recipient answers, pressing the conference button will add all the lines to one call.
- Speaker Button: To use the loudspeaker on the device.
- Hangup Button: Ends the call.
- View Recent History Section:
This section enables a user to view all information about
recent calls, including the date and time of the call. This history allows a user to
redial a contact by selecting the number.
Agent Extension
In addition to the softphone features mentioned above:
Pause/Unpause: The pause button enables the agent to enter a pause state. This will mean that they will not receive calls whilst this state persists. The agent’s state will change in the status toolbar, as well as in the Realtime Agents page, and any Realtime Queues or Campaigns that they are members of.
Log On/Off: An agent should log on at the beginning of the workday and log off when they have completed their workday. Agents should not use the log on/off as pause functionality. All pause and login details are available in Agent Analytics.
Dispositioning for Calls:
After a call, an agent may be required to report on the call’s outcome; this is referred to as Dispositioning. To make this as flexible as possible for clients’ reporting requirements and as easy as possible for agents, the first selection is the disposition category, being Fail, Unsure or Success. The Call Outcome dropdown will then be populated according to that category as is configured within the queue (or campaign) settings in the TMS.
Any notes or CRM tags captured during the call will populate automatically on this screen; alternatively, they can be captured at this point.
While the agent performs this wrapup, they will automatically be paused in the state “Wrapup”, this is a system pause state and is considered a productive pause. Wrapup has a timeout value, which, if it runs out, will submit a disposition of “Unsure - No agent submission” on behalf of the agent.
Dialer Extension
The Dialer extension allows all the features of an agent extension plus some additional for campaigns and campaign-related features. To understand these features, some background information on campaigns and their types is necessary.
Campaign Types
There are different campaign types available to cater for varying business usage cases, each behaving differently, so matching the tool to the requirement is important for achieving the desired results.
Preview
Preview Dialer selects a contact for an available agent and then works through each number available within the contact until there are no more numbers to try or a result has been reached. This approach means no leads are wasted, and every number is attempted that should be. When the contact has been chosen, that contact’s information is displayed, allowing the agent time to familiarise themselves for a defined prep period. When the countdown expires, the system will dial automatically on behalf of the agent.
Power-Dial
Power-Dial campaigns are more suited to scenarios of large numbers of contacts, which generally come at little or no cost, so wasting leads is less of a consideration than agent idle time. When an agent returns to an idle state, the system selects multiple contacts and then dials a single number from each of those contacts. The first person to answer is then passed to the agent. The rest of the contacts who answer may be configured to overflow to a set of actions such as a message or a queue of available agents.
Auto Dialer
Auto Dialer is a voice broadcasting dialer that runs calls independently from any extension. It calls on a concurrency scheme rather than a ratio because of that independence. It’s primary function is to call high volumes of leads very rapidly, predominantly to deliver a message, or to transfer into an inbound queue for handling further by agents.
The dialer extension has an additional window beyond that that is used by agents; this is to allow for contact information to be populated for preview, and then also used for dispositions after the call.
- A Preparation window before calls: When a call comes in, the caller’s details will appear in a preparation window giving the agent an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the caller’s information.
Participant vs Agent
Below are detailed a few of the differences between a participant and an agent.
Additional settings all extensions types have access to:
From the user’s availability settings, they are able to change their status:
Settings section allow a user to:
Change settings such as Default Sound input/output
Default volume
Ring volume
Ringtone
Click to Dial - Click on any number within Freshdesk to automatically make a call.
Webhooks
Webhooks are ways of integrating into applications at specific times during/after a call. Webhooks are a mechanism to allow the platform to interact with other systems. These can be added to campaigns to allow feedback at the start of a workflow in a secondary system to the CRM platform (Freshdesk). Webhooks must already exist in order to be selected within campaigns; these are created in the Integration Centre of the TMS.
The action of the webhook can be seen in the Freshdesk Softphone application.
When a webhook is added, three settings are available:
- Which webhook
- When to fire, i.e. what event will initiate the webhook
- Behaviour, i.e. whether to ask or just to do it.
Once configured, there are several things that can be done within your softphone application such as:
- View client details on answer of the call
- View client tickets on answer of a call
- Create tickets while on the call
- Add comments to existing tickets
Further information on this can be found in the Euphoria TMS User Guide.