Open Channel

Owned by XCALLY Knowledge (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Nov 07, 2024 by Product Knowledge
5 min read

The Open Channel Section shows all the interactions managed by the Agents and coming from external Channels (remember that only the Administrator can open XCALLY Motion to new channels).

Open Channel benefits

The Customer and the Agent can exchange messages (including files, emoticons, pictures and so on), reaping the following benefits:

  • the Customer can use a widespread and easy contact point (e.g. FB Messenger, Twitter, Telegram, Teams and so on)

  • the Agent interaction takes place inside XCALLY Motion common environment and as so, it benefits of the queue delivery mechanism

  • the Agent can manage several types of interactions at the same time

  • the interaction content is shared, easily retrieved and managed

  • all the Customers information is stored in the Contacts Manager 

Whenever customers interact with the Contact Center using external messaging systems, the Agents belonging to the specific open channel queue will receive a request on the Omni Desktop interface.

They can reject it and the request is automatically passed to another Agent in the same queue (in this case facebookqueue). 

The interaction starts when one agent accepts it: all the others will be notified that the interaction has already been taken by somebody else.

If your Agent Desktop is running on MAC with OS High Sierra and using the Browser Safari, remember to enable the audio notifications in Safari in order to receive an audio alert for all incoming interactions

Open Channel Session

Let's see how a typical FB message exchange session looks like:

Customer’s Side

Agent's Side:

Customer’s Side

Agent's Side:

Moreover every interaction presents, on the right side of the screen, contextual information that the agent can use (during the session or after it) to manage the interaction/customer with these tabs:

You can explore documentation about that on this page

Agents' message commands:

 

  1. Type field

  2. Emoticons

  3. Canned Answer

  4. File attachments: it’s possible to attach only a single file per message, whose size is up to 15 MB maximum (if enabled by the Admin in the Chat Website Settings)

  5. Voice Message

The agent can also insert an internal note: explore here documentation about that

 

On the Agent's side, anytime a message is sent:

a single checkmark means that the system encountered a problem

a double checkmark means that the message has been delivered to the Facebook channel (not to the customer)

 

Closing Open Channel session

If the Agent closes the session clicking on the X sign in the session tab:

and confirm:


The interaction can be simply Closed or Closed & Disposed.  You can explore documentation about dispositions on this page.

Moreover, if the Transfer option is set by the administrator in the Website Settings, the Agent can also see this command in the menu of 3 dots  in order to redirect the interaction:

You can explore documentation about transfer on this page.

 

Open Channel Interactions

All the list of the interactions managed by the Agents will be available on the Open Channel Interactions view:

The down/up arrows near the Last message field indicate if the last message was incoming or outgoing.
Messages sent as Auto-Reply or Secret Notes will not be considered as a Last Message

You can filter the interaction list by: Start Date, Read/Unread, Status (Open/Closed), Account name, Agent (the first one who managed it), Tags.

Moreover you can search interactions by search button (click here for documentation) or you can use advanced search (click here to read relative documentation).

If you see a small number near the contact name, like in the following picture:

it means that new interactions have been received (but not managed) in the same conversation.

When an interaction remains OPEN, the Agent can still send messages to the customer according to the channel regulations and policies: for example, Facebook allows the chat recipient to send messages to the chat initiator within 24 hours the session has been started; after that, only one message (tagged by a single checkmark) can be sent but, if nobody replies to you from the FB account, no more messages will be allowed

  • Clicking on the Interaction row, the agent is able to see all the messages exchanged in the single session, as well as the right side bar information (contact, interaction, journey).

  • Clicking on the three dots menu, the agent can apply the following commands to the selected interaction:
    - Show the interaction contents
    - Download a pdf transcript of the interaction (depending on Agent's permissions)
    - Close and (eventually) dispose the interaction.

An interaction Visibility can be: 

Private: it means that the interaction is a private message exchanged between the Agent and the Contact (e.g. using Messenger).

Public: it means that the interaction is exchanged between the Agent and a group on an open environment (e.g. Wall Posts on a FB page).

 

If the interaction is Closed you'll also see the date it has been closed and eventually its disposition:

For Administrators: If the Agent cannot is not able to create interactions or to reply to them (the text area is disabled) check the Reply URL field of the Account is not empty

Starting from version 3.42.0, the timestamp of createdAt is tracked in milliseconds to ensure proper ordering of interactions when handling a high volume of Open Channel messages.
In addition, the createdAt and updatedAt fields are set manually in the following API:
POST /api/openchannel/accounts/{id}/send
POST /api/openchannel/messages

The ability for these APIs to accept the createdAt parameter in ISO string format has been added, allowing clients to send their requests with a custom timestamp, ensuring proper sorting at all times.

On client side, the Open Channel sorting logic sorts based on createdAt(instead of id).

Send a new Open Channel Interaction

In order to send a New Open Channel interaction click on + button, choose the account (one in the list proposed for the specific Agent) from which to send it, and then write your message and insert the recipient (belonging to the list associated to the Account): 

If you insert at least three letters/numbers in the To field, the system will show you all the members of the list (according to the map field defined by the Administrator) that match: