Other Features

You’ve now created a really simple desktop with a script. By following the steps in this chapter, you’ll get a quick look at some of Syntelate XA’s other features.

This tutorial is by no means comprehensive, of course, and Syntelate XA has many more features than can be described here. But once you’ve finished this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the core concepts and be ready to explore Syntelate XA further yourself.

Removing the Completion Button

In the last chapter we added completion buttons to a script, but our original completion button is still there on the Customer Details data entry element. We don’t need this anymore, so open this data entry element and delete it (click and then Delete).

By the way, you’ll remember that in the last chapter we associated each of the three completion buttons with a completion code. This makes it easy to monitor the outcome of all calls. In our simple script, based on the completion button that the agent clicks, you can tell whether each call resulted in:

• A sale
• No sale
• A callback

In Syntelate XA, you could report on this in a dashboard, for example. Syntelate XA provides lots of features for reporting on the operation of your contact center — but that’s not within the scope of this tutorial.

Tabbed Data Entry Element

A data entry element can have multiple tabs, each displaying different information.

Seeing as you’ve got the Customer Details data entry element open anyway, let’s add a couple of new tabs to this.

First, click the tabbing toggle at the top to turn tabbing on:

Your data entry element should now look like this:

On the new blue bar, click to edit the tabs. Add two new tabs so that your list of tabs looks as follows:

Tab name	Order
Customer details	1
Interaction history	2
Sales promotion	3

Grids

On the Interaction history tab, add a grid control.

Rather than create a new grid, let’s just use an existing grid: in the grid’s properties, select History of Current Interaction as the Grid name.

At runtime, this will show a table (or “grid”) containing information about previous attempts to contact the customer. In your environment, this will be filled with nonsense data, but you’ll get the idea.

Anyway, let’s make some more changes before we test things out at runtime.

Iframes

On the Sales promotion tab, add an iframe control. This lets you embed another web page into your agent desktop.

In a real environment, this would be handy where, say, your agents need to use another web application alongside Syntelate XA. Rather than your agents having to toggle between Syntelate XA and the other web application, you could simply embed the other application into Syntelate XA.

For now, though, let’s just embed a Wikipedia page in your agent desktop. This may not be something you’d ever do in a live environment, but at least it will give you a feel for how iframes work!

Edit the iframe’s properties and set the Default source property to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_promotion.

All right, that’s us finished in this data entry element, so you can close it.

Action to Activate Tab

There’s a really powerful feature of Syntelate XA that we’ve not mentioned yet. No introduction to Syntelate XA would be complete without a bit on actions, though, so we’ll finish by adding a few actions to your desktop.

Open your script and edit the properties of the Right-party contact > Yes script box. Expand the Actions property group, and click at the bottom.

Call your action something like Activate sales promotion tab, and click SAVE. Choose to edit this now. You’ll jump from the Script Designer into the Action Builder.

We’ll talk about conditions later. For now, click beside Steps to run regardless of condition.

Create a step like this:

Click SAVE AND CLOSE, and then click to close the Action Builder and jump back to the Script Designer.

Still in the properties of the Right-party contact > Yes script box, select your new action for On enter actions.

What does all this mean? It means that, at runtime, when your script reaches this script box, this action is run — and the Sales promotion tab is automatically activated.

Hopefully that makes sense, but if not, it will once you try it out at runtime.

Action to Validate Callback

Before we finish up, let’s add a couple more actions. These are to tackle problems that you may have noticed in the last chapter, when you tried out your script.

Did you try setting a callback? If so, you may have noticed that it’s possible to set a callback in the past. That’s a bit silly, right? We should add some validation to prevent this, and we can do this via an action.

Open the Callback data entry element, and edit the properties of the completion button. Here, too, there is a button at the bottom. Click this, and create a new action called something like Check callback is in future.

We’ve not used the Condition box in the Action Builder yet — so let’s give it a shot!

A condition is something that is evaluated when the action is run. You can perform action steps based on the result of this evaluation.

We want a condition that assesses whether the callback date and time is in the future and prevents the completion of the call if it’s not. Here’s how we’ll go about doing that.

In the Condition box, enter: [INTERACTION_1.LKTL_RETRYAFTER] > now()

You can use the dropdowns to insert the database field and the function now(). This condition will evaluate as true when the LKTL_RETRYAFTER field is greater than the current date and time.

Next, add two condition-false steps as so:

Step name	Step type	Message
Show validation error	Show message	The callback must be in the future!
Cancel completion	Stop completion	N/A

These action steps are run when the condition is false — in other words, when the LKTL_RETRYAFTER field is set to a date and time in the past.

Back in the Data Entry Designer, add your new action to the Before click actions property of the completion button. Any actions here run when the agent clicks the button but before Syntelate XA processes this. As such, this is where you should put any validation.

Expanding Our Validation Action

If at runtime you tried setting a callback for, say, a minute in the future, you may have found that at the callback time Syntelate XA didn’t pass you the record that you expected but instead passed you other records to work on. We can fix this by increasing the priority of the callback record, so that Syntelate XA prioritizes it over any other records that are due.

If you did manage to get passed a callback record, you may have noticed that when the record came back to you, the script was still where it left off — at the callback page.

You probably don’t want this. Instead, when an agent is passed a callback, you probably want the script to go back to the start. We can achieve this by clearing the fields that are set by the script.

OK, let’s go back to our action. From the Data Entry Designer, you can get back into it by clicking the action name under Before click actions.

Back in the Action Builder, create some condition-true steps as follows:

Step name	Step type	Assignment statement
Increase priority	Assign value	[INTERACTION_1.LKTL_CBPRIORITY] =1
Clear right-party contact	Assign value	[INTERACTION_1.CALL_TOUCH] =''
Clear OK to talk	Assign value	[INTERACTION_1.CALL_OK_TO_TALK] =''

The first step increases the priority of the record to 1, the highest priority. The next two steps clear the fields that are set when an agent goes through the script.

Runtime

Once you’ve finished your changes, go back to the desktop and publish it again.

Now test this new stuff at runtime:

1. Have a look at the interaction history grid.
2. Try going through the script to the Sale Made? script box, and see how the Sales promotion tab automatically activates. Take a look at the iframe.
3. Try setting a callback for a time in the past. You’ll see a message telling you that the callback must be in the future. The completion operation will be canceled.
4. Try setting a callback for a minute in the future. When the callback record comes in, you’ll notice that the script starts at the start again.

That’s us now reached the end of this tutorial. In the last chapter What Next?, we’ll consider where you should go from here.