The common phrases feature, which customer service representatives (CSRs) can use to insert pre-configured messages in email and messaging channels, now makes it easier for CSRs to find and use common phrases and enable reporting on the usage of common phrases.

Enhancements to the search functionality now include searching for the text of the phrases in chat and email, allowing CSRs to enter keywords in the search box without having to know the category or phrase names.

You can now also make use of common phrases without leaving the search box. In App Studio, under Settings > Chat & messaging > Common phrases, you can now enable character-based quick navigation of phrases by using an auto-complete dropdown list. When a CSR enters the first few characters in the text field, the system starts searching common phrase categories, titles, and search text. In this way, CSRs can quickly enter common phrases without taking their hands off the keyboard.

For more information about configuring the common phrase settings, see "Common phrase search configuration" in Common phrases.

Customer Service Managers can now gather data and report on the use of common phrases. In App Studio, under Settings > Chat & messaging > Common phrases, you can now select a checkbox that enables the collection of data on common phrase usage. Pega Customer Service now also provides two reports with drilldowns on common phrase usage. CSR Managers can use these reports to identify the need for coaching of CSRs, to identify phrases that are never used, and to evaluate which phrases or categories are valid or could be improved based on their frequency of use.

For more information, see "Chat and messaging reports" in Pega Customer Service reports.

A new post-chat survey feature puts a web chatbot to work at the end of a chat interaction to ask the customer a brief survey question immediately afterwards. The bot then summarizes the survey results for use in a dashboard report in the Interaction Portal.

The post-chat survey feature includes three simple customer survey questions that correspond to three predominant Key Performance Metrics (KPIs): Net Promotor Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Customer service (CS) managers can customize all three survey questions for your company or product and they can configure the post-chat survey feature to deliver one of three customizable surveys to all web chat customers at the end of the interaction.

Post-chat survey reports

The following new reports in the Interaction Portal dashboard show the post-chat survey information:

NPS for chat

The NPS for chat report shows the Net Promoter Score that measures the willingness of your customers to promote your products and services to others.

CSAT for chat

The CSAT for chat report shows the customer satisfaction score for your products and services.

CES for chat

The CES for chat report shows the customer ease of interaction score that measures a customer’s effort to interact with your business to get an issue resolved.

To add these report widgets to your dashboard, follow the steps in Adding a widget to your dashboard.

For more information about configuring the post-chat survey, see Post-chat survey.

When you use external routing, Pega Customer Service redirects the queued chat requests to the configured external service URL as event notifications. The application also monitors the changes in the CSR availability and maximum concurrency to accept new requests. Pega Customer Service exposes a REST service over which the external routing system can communicate the final routing decision.

For more information about configuring third-party routing, see Third-party routing API .

Pega Customer Service supports a new channel, Interactive Voice Response- Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVR-IVA), to facilitate customer self-service through Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Customers can use this channel to pair their third-party IVR systems with Pega Customer Service chat and messaging bots through an API. The new channel and the API support a wider range of use cases for automated voice-based interactions.

The API functions as an events listener and translates external requests into Pega channel actions to process even complex user input. The channel ships with events for the following activities:

• Processing a service case
• Canceling case processing
• Gathering contact details against Automatic Number Identification (ANI)
• Ending a call

Pega Customer Service records every customer interaction that invokes the IVR-IVA as an interaction object, which records the case types that are processed during the interaction. The application also saves a transcript of the conversation between the caller and the IVR.

The previous IVR channel on the Channels and Interfaces page is deprecated.

For more information, see Self-service interactive voice response (IVR)

Pega Customer Service application no longer supports the Self-Service Configuration portal, where you could create these settings previously, and CustomerAdvisorConfig is removed from the CSSelfServiceAdmin access group.

Average response time for messaging interactions

The Average response time or average visitor wait-time on a queue is the average time that the end users wait before an available CSR accepts their escalation request. This report helps you measure the promptness of your contact center in addressing customer requests. Contact centers with short response times also see fewer chats that are abandoned by end users.

Bot interactions resolved without escalation

This report shows the number of resolved bot-only interactions, which did not require escalation to CSRs, from the total messaging interactions per day. You can drill down the report to see the number of bot-only interactions for each case type per day against their status. For example, the number of bot-only interactions on July 22 for Statement Copy case type is 20, 15 of them with the Resolved status and 5 with the Abandoned status. Tracking this metric helps you improve your self-service design and bot functionality, which positively impacts the cost of running a contact center.

Average number of messaging interactions per hour

This report shows the number of messaging interactions per day. You can drill down the report to see the average number of interactions for every queue per each hour. The report also provides a visual representation of the data on a line chart, with the hours of the day along the horizontal axis, the average number of interactions along the vertical axis, and different colors that represent the available queues.

Number of declined, expired, and transferred messaging requests

This report shows the number of messaging requests from customers that are either declined, transferred, or left to expire by the CSRs. The report compares these metrics against the overall messaging offers that are made to the CSRs in a particular queue and provides the data by the queue name, date, and agent's name.

For more information, see Pega Customer Service Chat Security Configuration API.