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Building Integrations

Experience Management’s open philosophy of implementing Open Standards and Open API allows businesses full control of own their data. API provides full access for integration into external applications and workflow or to access your data when you want, how you want. The API consists of REST Calls that enable you to make use/integrate/improve every function that is possible on the official app & official web insight center.

API Language Compatibility: C/C++, Objective-C, Swi, C#/.NET, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Ruby, Python

OS Compatibility: Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS, Android, WindowsPhone

Integrations/IntegrationMethod1.png

It is common for brands to have CRM systems, Helpdesk tools, Enterprise collaboration tools, Marketing automation tools, etc within their organization that hosts a wealth of data and are core to the functioning of the day-to-day activities within their organization. Any customer/partner could consume our open APIs to build integrations with any system of their choice.

Now that we are clear on the power of APIs and what can be achieved using the open APIs published by Experience Management, let’s dive deeper into the various integration opportunities.

There is a certain category of products with which Experience management integration opportunities are aplenty. In this section, we will look at some of the product categories and discuss some of the use cases that are popular amongst our customer base.


CRM System Integrations

By integrating your CRM with a CEM Platform like Experience management, you get:

This integration will provide real-time two-way exchange of information between CRM, Support, and the Experience management platform that enables real-time alerts, ticketing, and loop closure. Blending data from these two systems allows for personalized marketing by forming intelligent customer cohorts.

Here are a few CRM system integration use cases that are popular:

Experience Management has out-of-the-box, direct/One to One integrations built with Microsoft Dynamics. Please contact your partner to know more.

Help Desk & Ticketing Integrations

Closing the loop with the customer when they have a bad experience is one of the key drivers of satisfaction. The customers feel heard when the brand reaches out to them to address the concern(s) they have raised. We have some ready integrations with some of the popular helpdesk tools.

With this integration, you could get your Experience management account to work with your Helpdesk tool for grievance redressal based on customer feedback raised as tickets, close the loop & update data on your CEM Webex Experience Management platform with ticket status & more.

Here are a few Helpdesk tool integration use cases that are popular:

The integration will provide the agent with enough context to proactively understand the customer’s concerns and reach out with the right solution to not just satisfy the customer, but delight them!

Experience Management has out of the box, direct/One to One integrations built with Fresdhdesk, Zendesk and Zoho Servicedesk Plus. Please contact your partner to know more.

Contact Center Solutions

The contact center is a significant touchpoint for all customers of a company. Measuring customer journey experience at all touchpoints including contact center and making the insights available for agents and supervisors is a huge value for any organization. The challenge with the contact center is that agents seldom have visibility into a vast swath of the customer journey. What they typically have is a very narrow view, restricted to the few points where they interact with the customer.

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What happened to that customer downstream of the contact center interaction, and what will happen to that customer upstream, is typically hidden from their view—as we can see here. Without full visibility, they can never hope to convey the message to the customer that “We know you and, we care about your experience with us.”

According to McKinsey, “An excellent customer experience must last the entire journey.”

Webex Experience Management allows your business to see the entire journey to optimize customer experiences. We do this by setting up “listening posts” throughout the journey.

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One part of it is having these channels so that you could listen to the entire journey. The other part is actually how we measure experience. We measure this in a couple of ways. We support all common industry metrics. We support the Customer Satisfaction score, Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score. For the contact center trying to measure staff knowledge, friendliness, we have a wide array of score types that we support- star questions, smiley questions, slider, etc.

These are not the only ways to collect data. We have open APIs which help pull external transactional/operational data from systems like CRM or any system of records.

So the first part was listening and measuring. Now, all these data flow in Experience Management. The primary use cases from a contact center integration would be as follows:

The Cisco Contact center products (UCCX, UCCE, WxCC, and WxCCE) are now integrated with Cisco Webex Experience Management. As a part of Contact Center integration, we have enabled post-interaction survey collection and brought key aspects of our dashboard on the agent desktop.

You may read more details about the Experience Management and Cisco Contact center integrations here.


Enterprise Collaboration Tools

We now live in times where remote working has become the new normal. When employees of an organization that spans globally are all working remotely, enterprise collaboration tools are now pivotal in bringing them all together and allowing them to collaborate to achieve the outcome that they are all working towards.

One of the most important collaborations tools is an enterprise messaging software. Some popular enterprise messaging software are Webex Teams, Slack, Webex Teams, Salesforce chatter, etc.

Some popular integration use cases with enterprise messaging tools are:


SMS and Email Integrations

SMS and Emails are a popular channel for distributing surveys to the end customers. Embedding a survey link in an SMS or Email and sending it to the customer gives them the freedom to provide feedback at the time of their convenience. With real-time integrations with CRM systems or POS systems, this becomes a powerful survey distribution channel and is a lot more convenient compared to holding them up at the billing counter to fill feedback on a kiosk.

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The brand could also look to send SMS and emails in bulk as an end of day batch process as well. Experience Management offers the “Invitations management” module which is an open-source module that could be consumed for processing SMS and Emails in bulk. Please see the documentation here on the Invitations module for more details. The module has built-in extensibility options that allow Cisco customers/partners to bring their own SMS/Email vendor and integrate them into the Invitations module. Documentation pertinent to this topic is available here


Integration Methodologies

Experience Management allows for integrations in a couple of different ways:


One to One / Direct Integrations

It is common for brands to have CRM systems, Helpdesk tools, Enterprise collaboration tools, Marketing automation tools, etc within their organization that hosts a wealth of data and are core to the functioning of the day to day activities within their organization. Any customer/partner could consume our open APIs to build integrations with any system of their choice.

Partners/Customers can build their own integrations with Experience management. The only pre-requisite for this would be to have a valid Experience management product login credentials with read/write access.

This is a standard integration practice which in general involves the customer and the Cisco partner working together to scope the integration and develop and host the integration on an infrastructure maintained by the partner or on the customer premises. We have covered some technical details on our APIs and provided reference examples in our dev guide section.


Integration Automation Using Microsoft Logic Apps

In large organizations, data is generally distributed across disparate systems like CRM systems, ERP systems, big data databases, etc. Its more a need now than ever to have these data flow across different systems for either point-in-time feedback collection, visualization, notifications, AI & ML, marketing automation, etc. Building tight integrations between multiple such systems are time-consuming and incur a cost of development, hosting, etc as well. The open API architecture of the Experience management platform scores high here. We leverage the Microsoft Logic apps platform to have 200+ available integrations with various systems to help automate workflows or business processes with less effort and in a cost-effective manner.

Azure Logic Apps is a cloud service that helps you schedule, automate, and orchestrate tasks, business processes, and workflows when you need to integrate apps, data, systems, and services across enterprises or organizations. Logic Apps simplifies how you design and build scalable solutions for app integration, data integration, system integration, enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) communication, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or both.

To build enterprise integration solutions with Azure Logic Apps, you can choose from a growing gallery with hundreds of ready-to-use connectors, which include services such as Azure Service Bus, Functions, and Storage; SQL, Office 365, Dynamics, Salesforce, BizTalk, SAP, Oracle DB, file shares, and more. Connectors provide triggers, actions, or both for creating logic apps that securely access and process data in real-time.

Please click here for full list of connectors.

Building integrations with Experience Management using Microsoft Logic apps is extremely simple and needs no coding/development. One can quickly build integrations by simply following the instructions given below.

Experience Management connectors will be published and will be available for consumption in Microsoft logic apps before end of Oct 2020.

Microsoft Logic Apps Billing Explained

For ease of understanding, let’s consider a specific Use case for Experience management and Salesforce integration and understand the monthly billing for it. Here is the Use case.

Acme Inc has an Experience management account and collects an average of 100,000 responses a month. Acme wants to create tickets in Salesforce for all detractor feedback given by their customers. All updates done on the tickets should be indicated on the Experience Management responses as well. Once a ticket is closed, a post ticket closure WXM survey should be sent to measure the Agent experience.

To set up the above integration in Logic Apps, the following set of connectors would need to be used.

Sl No Logic app Workflow Region No. Of Actions (Success) No. Of Actions (Failed) No. Of Enterprise Connectors No. Of Standard Connectors
1 #1. Collect feedback with Webex Experience Management and raise tickets South India 4 2 0 3
2 #2. Assign tickets to agents and generate the history of responses through intelligent ticket routing

Update notes both on Salesforce and Webex Experience Management to track progress of tickets
South India 6 2 0 2
3 #3. Send out Post Closue Ticket Webex Experience Management surveys from Salesforce South India 3 2 0 2

Logic Apps billing takes into consideration the Actions executed, No: of standard connectors and No: of Enterprise connectors used in building a Logic app workflow. Each execution is priced as given below. For the purpose of this example we have assumed the logic app is deployed in one of the North America Azure region.

Price per execution
Actions $ 0.00003
Standard Connector $ 0.00013
Enterprise Connector $ 0.0010
Logic apps pricing differs across various Azure regions. Please follow the link for region based pricing details. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/logic-apps/.

Given 100,000 responses, lets assume Acme has about about 30% detractors. Based on this, following can be arrived at:

Based on the above action executions, the following would be the billing for each logic app workflow created for each use case:

Sl No Logic app Workflow Monthly Billable Executions (Assumed) Success Records Failed Records Action Executions
Per month
Monthly Estimated Cost
(Actions + Stnd Connector Exec)
1 #1. Collect feedback with Webex Experience Management and raise tickets 30,000 18,000 12,000 96,000 74.40
2 #2. Assign tickets to agents and generate the history of responses through intelligent ticket routing

Update notes both on Salesforce and Webex Experience Management to track progress of tickets
90,000 54,000 36,000 3,96,000 306.90
3 #3. Send out Post Closue Ticket Webex Experience Management surveys from Salesforce 30,000 18,000 12,000 78,000 60.45
Total Cost per Month 441.75
Formulas used in the cost calculation for the above mentioned scenario
  • Success records = 60% of Monthly billable executions (Assumed value for this calculation)
  • Failure records = 40% of Monthly billable executions (Assumed value for this calculation)
  • Action executions per month = (Success record x No. Of Actions (Success))+(Failed Records x No. Of Actions (Failed))
  • Monthly Estimated Cost = (Action executions per month x $0.00003)+(No: of standard connectors executed x $0.00014)