Hybrid Chat

Hybrid Chat is a business-to-customer Livechat solution that unifies customer chats across channels. You can use chatbots as primary chat participant or as an agent assistant.

Rasa.ai is shipped as a pre-integrated bot and Docker container - other bots may also be integrated via the Chatbot API. - this has been successfully deployed with Google Dialogflow, Microsoft Azure Botframework/ LOUIS, IBM Watson.

Hybrid Chat can be integrated with Cisco Contact Center Express and Enterprise and uses same contact center agents for routing chat requests while Cisco CC routes them voice calls. See Cisco Contact Center Integration

It can also be embedded within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or any HTML5-compatible CRM solution This allows customer identification from MS-CRM on chat arrival and chat events in CRM for reporting.

Chat Channels


Hybrid Chat provides integration with media channels including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Viber, Web-Chat, and SMS. For further details on each of the supported channels, follow the relevant links below: 


For developing additional chat channels, use the Channel Integration API. See Channel Manager Configuration Guide for channel settings. 


Agent Platforms



Hybrid Chat agent gadget is an HTML5 based embeddable application built using Agent API.
The app can be loaded on any compatible browser with the agent app URI and can be embedded in Cisco Finesse, Microsoft CRM, and any other HTML5 supported applications.


With CRM integration, Hybrid Chat can:

  1. Push chat activities to CRM
  2. Auto-login with CRM user login
  3. Automatic customer screen-pop on chat arrival, etc., assuming that CRM APIs are available.

All of this can be done for instance in the case of Dynamics Unified Service Desk and Dynamics CRM Web through CIF (Channel Integration Framework). The same can be done for SAP Hybris using the SAP Widget Integration



Bot Integration


A Hybrid Chatbot is more than just a chatbot. In addition to bot-to-customer conversations via pre-chat form, post-chat survey, conversational forms, response to repeating customer queries, the Bot also controls a chat conversation based on different internal or external events. 

You may use Rasa, Google DialogFlow, or can integrate any bot of your choice using Chatbot API.

Hybrid Chat contains rasa.ai out-of-box but it can be integrated with Google DialogFlow, IBM Watson, Microsoft LUIS, or any bot implementing Chatbot API. The chatbot may serve the customer directly as a primary interface or assists the human agent by giving suggestions on every customer query. To learn how Hybrid Chat integrates with a bot, see: 

Learn more about Hybrid Chat bot capabilities for a conversation control.


Precision Routing


Hybrid Chat uses Routing Engine for a human agent selection for a give request. It does attributes based resource selection based on multiple steps defined for a particular queue. See MRE User Guide for details. For an architectural overview, see the architecture and communication flow.

It works both with Cisco UCCE and UCCX for media blending and uses Cisco contact center Agents. However, you'll need to define Attributes (skills) and Queues in the Routing Engine.  See Cisco Contact Center Integration for details. It routes all non-voice media requests to the blended-agents.

For Routing Engine APIs, see MRE 3.x APIs.



Reporting


Hybrid chat provides a number of different reports including, Agent Availability, Chat productivity, Chat Detail, Chat Volume by Queue, Chat Volume by Channel, and Agent Chat Productivity. All these reports are shipped with a basic Hybrid Chat license in Cisco CUIC. These can also be enabled in any third-party tools that you use. Hybrid Chat, in this case, will expose its reporting DB.


Reports are developed on the following solutions. See the report's availability status on each under the Status column. 

  • CUIC - Cisco Unified Intelligence Center for UCCX and UCCE - Used when Hybrid Chat run in integrated mode with Cisco contact center.
  • EFBI - Expertflow Reporting solution on Windows with SQL Server backend - May be used when Hybrid Chat is deployed in a standalone mode.
  • EFBI-Custom - A customized implementation of EFBI - Used on some legacy deployments.




Language Support


By default, Hybrid Chat agent gadget supports 5 languages namely English, French, Arabic, Chinese and German. Support for additional languages can be easily added thorough the addition of installation files. These installation files basically contain all the information needed by Hybrid Chat agent gadget to display each agent option in the selected language. This works independent of either the customer web gadget language, the language of communication of the customer or the language in which the bot is trained. 


Release Summary

See Release notes for details.


Deployment

See the Hybrid Chat Deployment guide for deploying the solution.



Demo environment

For details on how to access our demo labs, see here.