Contacts and Interactions

An interaction In Speech Analytics, an interaction represents a single part of the contact between one employee and the same customer. In Text Analytics, an interaction is the communication session between one or more employees and the same customer with a unifying contextual element. is any single communication between an employee and a customer. In a contact The entire communication experience for a customer, from beginning to end. center, an interaction can be, for example, a phone call, an email, or web chat handled by a specific employee. In a back-office setting, an interaction can be a claim processed by a specific employee.

A contact is a collection Group of back-office Contributions from one or more employees connected to a single customer or account captured by DPA. Collections are used for analyzing and improving back-office efficiency and quality. of related interactions, representing a customer's entire communication session with the enterprise, from beginning to end.

Example: Contact and interactions in a contact center

A contact can be a phone call that starts from when an employee answers a customer call, to when the customer hangs up the call. If the customer speaks to only one employee during the call, the contact contains one interaction. However, if a customer is transferred from one employee to another, the contact contains two interactions.

A contact center focuses typically on the individual interaction and its related employee. This focus allows understanding and managing the quality of service provided in the contact center. Quality-of-service activities include evaluating the performance of an employee and assigning coaching to the employee.

Contacts are typically used to understand customer sentiment (by performing activities such as assessing the entire call, email chain, or web chat).

Enterprise Cradle-To-Grave Enabled Contacts

The Enterprise Cradle-To-Grave feature gathers partial contacts (interactions) originating from different CTI Servers. It then merges them into a single contact with corrected contact-level information in the Contact database. By default, the system identifies the single contact with corrected contact-level information based on the Contact ID (configurable).

The gathering mechanism has an estimated three-hour delay that is needed to combine the interactions of the contact into a corrected contact. The implication of the delay is that functionality related to the contact is only available when the correct contact record is created in the Contact database.

This functionality includes:

Storing and displaying contact ID, number of holds, number of transfers, number of conferences, total hold time, contact-level exception flag, contact start time, and duration
Displaying all the related interactions for playback Process of selecting a recorded interaction, playing it back to listen to the call, and viewing the content of the interaction on the screen.
When viewing interactions from the Contact OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) Database, no contact flagging or assessments can be done
Updating the Inbox only after the three-hour delay

Playback Contact Gathering

During playback, interactions belonging to the same contact are gathered so than an entire contact can be played back at once. Depending on your organization's Playback Contact Gathering settings, interactions are gathered to a single contact according to the ANI, Contact ID, Custom Data field, or Switch Call ID assigned to an interaction.

If Playback Contact Gathering is according to a Custom Data field, when searching for a contact, the system plays back all interactions assigned with the Custom Data. The time window for searching for contacts according to a Custom Data field is 30 minutes (configurable internal parameter). If you search for a contact that contains interactions outside the time window, the system may play back interactions not related to this contact. For example, if you perform a search at 09:00 AM, the system gathers interactions tagged with the Custom Data that were recorded between 08:30 AM and 09:30 AM. If an interaction related to the contact was recorded before this time window, the system may play back unrelated interactions.

If Playback Contact Gathering is according to the Contact ID, and Cradle-to-Grave is enabled in your system, when searching for a contact for which Cradle-to-Grave gathering has not yet completed (estimated 3 hours), not all related interactions are played back.