How do I set up my contact center?

Congratulations on deciding to use Zailab. Before you start to dial out, we recommend setting up a few things.

Optional Steps

We recommend completing the optional steps before the mandatory steps.

• Sites, services, and skills are created upfront and used to help match work to the right agent. 
• These properties are assigned to work types and to agents. When work is created, it will only be served to an agent with matching properties.
• Properties: 
  • Sites:
    • Create sites if your agents are working from multiple locations and you want to route work items (calls, emails, prospects, et cetera) to agents at a specific location. For example, you might want all your London calls to be routed to agents in Cape Town.
    • If the work can go to any available agent no matter where they are located, or you only have one location for your agents, you can use the default Home site that we created for you.
  • Services:
    • Services represent the departments in your contact center – such as collections, client services or sales. Create services to ensure that work items are routed to agents who can handle that type of work. Sales agents, for example, should receive sales work items.
    • You do not have to set up services if you only offer one service and you don't mind using the default general service we created for you.
  • Skills: 
    • Skills help segregate your work based on the expertise of your agents. For example, some work items have specific language requirements. In this case, if a work item requires an English skill (because the client pressed 1 for English on the IVR), an agent will need to have the English skill in order to receive that work item. 
    • If you are creating an IVR and each option must go to a specific group of agents, you must create a skill for each IVR option. 
    • If there is more than one email or SMS work type within the same service that must be handled by a different group of agents, create a skill for each of these work types. For example, you'll do this if you have a client-servicing department with one email address that handles TV inquiries and another email address that handles laptop inquiries.
    • If the above does not apply, you do not need to create skills. 
  • Surveys:
    • Interactive voice response (IVR) surveys let you gain feedback from your clients automatically. These surveys, which accept numerical responses from a phone keypad, are invaluable for research, client-relationship management, and performance management. 
    • If you don't need to gather feedback from your customers, you do not need to create skills. 

Mandatory Steps

• As an interaction (SMS, call, email, et cetera) comes in through an interaction flow, a work item is created and placed in the universal waiting room.
  • The work item is matched to the agent based on its properties (see Optional steps above).
• Step 1: Create work types
  • Work types are like templates that define work items, which are the units of work your agents must perform (e.g. an English sales task).
  • All interaction flows require at least one work type.
  • If you are creating an IVR and each option must go to a specific group of agents, you must create a work type for each IVR option. Each work type will need a skill (see Skills above).
  • If there are emails or SMSes within the same service that must be handled by a different group of agents, create a work type for each type of email and SMS. You will require a skill for each of these work types (see Skills above). 
• Step 2: Create interaction flows
  • Interaction flows route interactions (calls, emails, SMSes) and create work items that are placed in the universal waiting room.
  • From the waiting room, work items are matched to agents.
  • After an interaction, customers may need to be routed further (e.g. to a post-call survey).
  • Essentially, flows determine what must happen to your customers before, during and after an interaction.
  • For example:
    • If a call comes in and you need to route it to a mailbox after hours, that would be configured in the flow. 
    • If you want to set up an IVR to route certain callers to certain groups of agents, you would also set that up in a flow. 
• Step 3: Invite members
  • Once you've created work types and flows, you can invite members. Note: you could do this first, but your new members won't be able to do anything until you've completed the above steps.
  • When you invite members, you must give them roles and properties. 
  • Different roles have access to different features. Currently, we don't have multi-role support, but don't worry – it's coming. For the time being, if you have users with multiple roles, you will have to invite them using different email addresses for the different roles.
  • Properties are extremely important because they tell the routing system how to match work items to agents.
• Step 4: Get your users to register themselves and off you go!
  • Once your users have registered themselves and their softphones, they are ready to start working.