Customer accounts management

Last Updated : Dec 14, 2022 |

Avaya Oceana® provides customer support entered account data to enhance the management of customer accounts. A customer account consists of the following components:

  • Account type: The account associated with the customer for an interaction. For example, social security number, booking reference, support ticket, or subscription number. You must specify the account type in Omnichannel Database through Oceana Customer Management Tool (OCMT) before a customer contact forwards the account to Avaya Oceana®.

  • Account value: The value that the end customer supplies during the customer’s interaction with the Avaya Oceana® contact center.

Avaya Oceana® supports accounts for voice and generic channels only.

  • In the voice channel, two methods of orchestrating front-end IVR are Avaya Experience Portal and Avaya Aura® Call Center Elite.

    Note:

    The sample Experience Portal IVR application collects the account value from voice callers. This sample IVR application and the Call Center Elite workflow are available on DevConnect.

    The account is used to retrieve the internal customer ID value associated with the account from the Omnistore database through the CustomerManagementService and OCPDataServices snap-ins. The customer ID value is then used to track the customer interactions using Avaya Context Store Snap-in and the customer journey feature in Avaya Oceana®. The account of the current customer interaction is stored, retrieved, and updated in Avaya Context Store Snap-in through the OceanaCoreDataService, Oceana Pluggable Data Connector, and the Engagement Designer tasks. The information is then retrieved and updated through the sample Engagement Designer workflows. This enables the customer journey feature to display the account of current customer interaction with the customer's previous interactions in Avaya Oceana®.

  • In generic channel support, for each generic contact entered in Avaya Oceana®, an account is specified with the contact, which is then stored in the Oceana Omnistore database. All generic contacts that contain an account are tracked and used by customer journey in the same way as voice interactions.

Warning:

Avaya Oceana® does not validate any customer entered account value or CRM identifier value against data stored in the Omnichannel database. For more details on validation caveats, see Avaya Oceana® Release Notes.

Capturing custom data from Avaya Oceana® voice calls

Avaya Context Store Snap-in provides a centralized solution to store contextual information about PSTN voice callers and their contacts. Avaya Context Store Snap-in can store context entries containing several data elements. The following are the key data elements:

  • ContextID: A text field containing a unique context identification. You can specify the contextID when adding the context entry in Context Store. Context Store generates a unique id if you do not specify a contextID when creating a context.

  • Data: The data field in a context entry is an abstract map with multiple key-value pairs. Keys in the data field must be unique. Multiple identical keys in the same request results in the values being overwritten with the last key.

For more information about other Avaya Context Store Snap-in data elements, see Avaya Context Store Snap-in Reference.

Avaya Context Store Snap-in maps the front-end customer’s data model into the Context Store data model. You must consider the type of data and the size of data that you want to store in Context Store. There are several methods to add or update data in Context Store.

If your solution includes Avaya Experience Portal (AAEP), Avaya Oceana® provides a Pluggable Data Connector (PDC) to integrate with AAEP. AAEP uses call flows created in Orchestration Designer (OD) to handle incoming PSTN calls and capture customer data. When you install the Avaya Oceana® PDC in OD, a Context Store Connector node is available in OD. You can use the Context Store Connector node to integrate Avaya Context Store Snap-in into your call flows. You can also configure the Context Store Connector node to perform actions such as creating, getting, updating, or deleting context information using the contextID.

The External Data Mart (EDM) database and Journey PU are the other components of an Avaya Context Store Snap-in deployment. Avaya Context Store Snap-in uses the Journey PU to persist Context Store data to the External Data Mart. Components such as Customer Journey can retrieve the data from the External Data Mart when required and present it to Avaya Oceana® users. Context Store data expires after the predefined Lease Time parameter expires. The Lease Time parameter is configurable, and Context Store preserves a context entry until the lease time expires. Any Avaya Context Store Snap-in client can renew this lease or time-to-live anytime. The default value for lease time is 7200 seconds; you can configure the lease time to be any value between 1 second and 86400 seconds. Clients can also define the lease time when creating a context and specify different lease time values for different scenarios. If a context is accessed after its lease time has expired, it is resurrected into the data grid from the External Data Mart, using the default lease time.

The following rules apply to adding, updating, and deleting Avaya Context Store Snap-in data in an Avaya Oceana® deployment:

  • Context Store stores the default standard schema detail. Schema contains caller attributes and Work Assignment related data against a unique contextID.

  • You can pass custom data into Context Store using the Data element. For example, a customer’s ticket number, location, or interest. Using a customized version of the default Avaya Oceana® AAEP application, you can capture the caller's custom data. You can then insert it into an existing Work Request ID using the Data field of that existing Work Request. In Avaya Oceana®, the Context ID and the Work Request ID are set to the same value. This process assumes that an existing Work Request ID is available to the AAEP application if deployed. In an Avaya Oceana® and AAEP deployment, Context Store can generate the Work Request ID. If you use Elite IVR, the UCID value is used. If you use Elite IVR, AAEP is not required.

  • Avaya Oceana® supports data privacy. Custom data is not stored in the EDM database to comply with privacy laws. An administrator can change the default setting if there is a requirement to store custom data.

  • You must use a maximum value of 600 Bytes for the custom data field size. To use a larger data field size, contact Avaya Support.

For other Avaya Context Store Snap-in deployments where there is a requirement to add custom data, see Avaya Context Store Snap-in Developer Guide and Avaya Context Store Snap-in Reference, available on the Avaya Support website at https://support.avaya.com.