Customers in today’s hyperconnected world want to easily communicate with different channels, including phone, Facebook, mail, voice and Twitter. They also expect a fast, contextual and consistent response.

Contact center cloud solutions turn calls, email, chat and social comments into a seamless conversation to offer the best customer journey. And a modern contact center solution like the Genesys® PureCloud® application needs to enrich each interaction — adding metadata to cover a wide range of use cases. For example, it could:

  • Offer dedicated and personalized services or IVR choices based on customer data — a one-to-one approach
  • Increase or decrease the priority of a calle — not all customers are equals for the organization
  • Find her/his personal advisor based on the agent’s portfolio
  • Solve problems without the help of human agents — using self-service or bots that are built on artificial intelligence (AI) to offer self-service capabilities

The strategic component of this type of initiative is integration: The contact center system needs to access data and an organization’s process to build a computer–telephone integration (CTI). And all use cases must be deployed to enable you to scale up or down, depending on demand. This allows you to make the best use of resources — without bogging you down in technology integrations, upgrades and innovations.

Integration Through APIs

According to Wikipedia “Web APIs are interfaces for the outside world to interact with the business logic.” In our scenario, the outside world is the PureCloud application, which needs to interact with business logic to have the best customer journey.

A modern organization likely will use an API management system to expose data and process that data to third-party systems. The PureCloud application can interact with public APIs — giving organizations all the power of external data and process. However, many wonder what happens when APIs aren’t exposed to the cloud.

Making Cloud and On-Premises Talk to One Another

The organization might not be ready to expose APIs over the internet, possibly because the system and the data weren’t designed to be consumed by the cloud. In addition, the efforts or concerns to expose that data become obstacles in creating tight integrations.

The organization can use a powerful cloud contact center based on the PureCloud application. This solution features a lot of internal data. Processes that can be used during interaction flows to create great customer experiences. But it’s important to link them in secure and reliable ways.

The Genesys Bridge Server has a specific connector called web services data dip that achieves this. However, the product and its connected were deprecated in late 2019. One modern alternative is to use the “onStage SE Bridge.” This solution leverages the onStage API Management, an enterprise solution to manage and orchestrate data and public APIs. It can be integrated with the PureCloud application.

The onStage SE Bridge lets you access internal data from the PureCloud application using actions — a way to interact with public APIs — without concerns of making the data publicly available. This enables onStage to create the bridge between the Genesys product and the private environment. You can also replace Active Directory integration; other integrations are on the roadmap.

For more information, visit us on the AppFoundry Marketplace.

This post was co-authored by Sergio Picchioni, Practice Manager at Bizmatica Econocom. “Thanks to 15 years of experience as an IT project manager, at Bizmatica I am currently responsible for all the professional services activities (pre sale, projects and maintenance) to develop mission-critical customer care projects for large and medium enterprise. I focus on continuous technology scouting and innovation waves: Artificial Intelligent and conversational design, Business Intelligence, Cloud Contact Center and omnichannel solutions, Process Automation,  CRM and Data integration and all the systems that can create the best Customer Experience”.