What’s New in Dovetail Agent 20

August 13, 2018

We recently released Dovetail Agent version 20. Here’s a run-down of the highlights.

Interactions

Dovetail Agent now includes Interactions functionality.

An Interaction is just that – a way to capture any type of interaction you may have with a customer.

In call centers, it’s common to capture every call as an interaction. A customer may call into the call center to check on the status of an order, or to inquire about a billing question, etc. Each of these can be captured as an interaction in the system.

In many service centers, a case is overkill for tracking these simple inquiries. We want to capture that we’ve interacted with the customer, but we don’t need all of the more complex workflow that goes along with a traditional support case.  But, in some instances, an interaction may also lead to a case being created, and we’ve made it easy to create a new case from the interaction page.

There’s nothing that says that Interactions have to be an interaction with a human. And, it’s often the case that interactions are created programatically.  For example, years ago I worked on a project for a bank, and each time a customer called into the bank’s IVR system, an interaction was created automatically. All of these interactions roll up into a complete view of every touch-point with a customer.

Functionality also includes

• Logging Notes to an interaction, including the use of Canned Responses.
• Searching and Querying for Interactions
• The interactions functionality can be completely enabled/disabled on a system wide basis
• Privileges allow for control of who can create, edit, and query for interactions
• Recent Interactions are shown on the Contact page

At Mentions

Sometimes while working a case, you’ll want to call the attention of another employee. When you include a mention (by typing @ and then the user’s name or login name) in your notes, that employee will be notified (via a business rule). Mentions are currently supported only on cases, when Logging Notes or Logging Research Notes.

This works similar to @mentions in many of the other apps that we use on a daily basis, including Facebook, Twitter, and Slack.

Mentions are a great way to loop someone else into a case, without having to transfer ownership of the case itself.

Slack Notifications

Instead of getting notified by email, a user can choose to receive notifications within Slack.

When a user chooses to receive Slack Notifications, a direct message will be sent to the employee’s personal Slack channel.

I’ll have another post soon that goes into more details regarding Slack Notifications.

 

Log Email with Existing Attachments

When logging an email, users can now select an existing file attachment to include in the outgoing email

History Improvements for Emails with Attachments

History: Attachments that are part of an email (Sent Email or Received Email) are now grouped with the email history item, instead of showing as separate items.

This makes the history much cleaner, and makes it clearer which files were included with which emails.

Toggle Case Notes Visibility

Allow case notes to be toggled between Public and Internal. This allow for hiding case notes in SelfService/WebSupport-type applications.

For example, as a user, I may save a regular note that is supposed to be Internal Only. That note can now be easily toggled to be marked as Internal.

Schema Path Builder

Schema Path Builder, to assist with building schema paths for Rule Properties and Auto-Destination Rules

Workgroup Specific Broadcasts

Broadcasts can now be sent to everyone, or only to members of one or more workgroups

Business Rule Condition Ordering

Business rule conditions can now be ordered (and re-ordered), and Rulemanager will evaluate these conditions in order.

This allows for fine-tuning of how Rulemanager evaluates business rules, and can help with performance.

For example, there may be a custom rule property that needs to do an expensive cross-server query. By putting that condition last, it allows the simple conditions to be evaluated first, and the expensive evaluation to be avoided if any of the simple conditions evaluate to false.

History for Task Manager

Tasks and Task Sets (part of the Task Manager functionality) now include a History tab, which tracks activities (create, edit, add, delete).

This allows better visibility and auditing capabilities as to who has edited these items and when.

 

Wrap Up

There’s a bunch of cool stuff in this release – and many of these items were enhancements submitted directly by customers.

For a complete list of enhancements and fixes, refer to the What’s New section in the Agent 20 documentation.

If you want to learn more, or want to see a demo of Agent in action – just drop me a line or give me a call – I’m always happy to show off our applications!