Customer wants an agent to be able to engage a Breeze application to collect a credit card number. While the number is being collected, the agent is on hold and cannot hear what the customer is entering. Upon conclusion of entering the number, the agent is added back into the voice path and continues on with the customer

Is this possible with Breeze? My gut tells me, "no."

Thanks

Hi Andrew, there is a way that this can be done. Breeze would have to be in the call signaling path (but not the media path) for its duration. You would define a custom event type to start credit card collection. The agent desktop application would have to know the UCID of the call, learned from AES or from One-X Agent screen-pop. When the agent pressed the "collect credit card button", here's what would happen:

* The agent desktop application (or more likely the server backing it) would publish to the Eventing Connector on the cluster IP address. The POST would have to have a query parameter with "interactionId=<UCID of the call>"

* One of the machines in the cluster would receive the POST. The Eventing Connector would check to see if the provided UCID is on this Breeze instance or another one. If on another one, it would send a 302 with that particular instance's IP address. The agent desktop application would have to honor this 302 and POST again to the provided address.

* Once the POST has landed on the right Breeze instance, the workflow would be launched. The UCID would also have to be in the body of the event schema so that ED has access to it.

* Here's the key aspect to this whole scheme. Breeze can't put the agent on hold, but it CAN ensure that the agent can't hear what's going on. It would do this by playing an announcement to the agent. This could be silence, or music, or whatever is desired. As long as there is a file being played to the agent, the agent won't hear what's happening on the call.

* The credit card is collected

* After collection of the credit card, the play announcement operation is interrupted. I think this happens automatically with a boundary event but am not sure about that. There's a chance you may need to write your own task types for this.

* The workflow can then issue a REST request to whatever destination needs the credit card.

* As long as the default media server inclusion policy hasn't been changed, the media server will automatically be shuffled out of the call at this point to conserve media resources.

Let me know if you have any questions.

I realized that I missed a step. You'll need to have another "no-op" workflow or snap-in that is invoked at the time the call is first made into the contact center. This workflow would do only one thing: Allow the call. The only purpose of it is to get Breeze into the signaling path of the call so that it can later take action if needed.

Thanks, Joel! My biggest sticking point was putting the agent "on hold" so he or she could not hear the transaction. Playing media to the agent didn't occur to me.

One more thing. I just had a discussion with the customer and they are now asking if the credit card collection can be done with speech instead of DTMF. For example, "Tell me your 16-digit credit card number." Their idea was that Breeze would conference in an IVR to do that, but as far as I know, that is not a possibility.

Do you have any more rabbits you can pull out of your hat?

You're welcome. Remember to include the interactionId / redirect aspect as well. Cross-server media invocations are something I've always wished we supported on Breeze but we were unfortunately never able to add it. You've got to make sure that the workflow is instantiated on the Breeze that was originally sequenced.

Sorry Andrew, I'd missed your follow-up question. I may have one other rabbit for you. Have you played with the IVR task at all? It lets you do full ASR including grammars, etc. Check it out!

I would like to check it out, but I can't find it. I don't see it anywhere on my 3.4 Collaboratory or my 3.5 C1 lab. It's not mentioned in the help, either. Is there a special bundle that needs to be loaded?

It sounds like the IVR bundle is a separate download. I'm working on finding the download info for you.

Hello again. Here's what I discovered for the IVR bundle. Let us know how it goes for you!

Bundle name is VXML Bundle.

PLDS Id for 3.4 SP1 is ED000000079


PLDS Id for 3.4 SP patch is ED000000086

Thanks, Joel! I am now working with Valerie to figure out the licensing issues. If it's not one thing, it's another. :-(