We are always on the lookout for innovative features to add to Finesse and one area that has been highly intriguing over time is marquee messaging and agent-to-agent chat. We have known about the importance of this functionality long before we even released Finesse, but we were never able to find a good technology to be the basis for the implementation. We knew that customers were going to want an API create messages, want it to work across Finesse instances, and have the messages be persistent. We didn’t want to build something from scratch because that would be extremely time-consuming when off-the-shelf functionality would eventually exist to give us what we needed. Despite strong opinions that we needed this feature in Finesse, we waited because we didn’t like any of the technical options available at the time.
As soon as Cisco Spark was released, we knew this would be the answer to our technical challenges. Spark is perfect for Contact Center team collaboration. Spark has a robust API enabling us to deliver the most optimal UX in Finesse. Spark has a persistent message store and allows for easy collaboration inside and outside of the contact center. Most importantly, Spark is organized around rooms (instead of people) which dovetails nicely with contact centers (anonymous users organized around skill groups or attributes).
We are proud to announce our first modest offer in this space, the “Cisco Spark Team Announcements Gadget”. The UI is elegant, simple, and powerful. We have built a gadget that allows a group of agents to send and receive announcements in a single Spark Room. Anyone who is a member of the room can post messages to the room. Members can include agents who access the room via Cisco Finesse or other enterprise users (or bots!) who use the Spark Mobile App or other Spark clients.
Some detailed points to understand:
- The gadget is designed to work with Finesse 10.6, 11.0, and 11.5
- The gadget is free and will work with the Cisco Spark Free plan. See the Cisco Spark pricing plans for more details.
- Each instance of the gadget can host a single Spark room but an agent can have multiple instances of the gadget in their Finesse layout if they need access to different rooms
- Support will be provided out of DevNet on a best effort basis
- Feel free to download the code and modify as you see fit
Please use the comments section below to tell us what you think. Should we provide more gadgets that utilize Cisco Spark? Should we formally productize this gadget and include in our next Cisco Finesse release along with full TAC support? As always, your feedback is important to us so tell us what you think!
Click to download here.
Sincerely,
Ted Phipps
CCE Product Line Manager
