The Magic of Scripter

August, 2018

A potted history of Sytel’s Scripter product and how it continues to grow and evolve.

With apologies, this month’s blog is a bit of a history lesson on contact center scripting.

Back in the 1990s the two essential components of a contact center solution were a scripting application to model agent processes and CTI integration to allow first-party control of the PBX or ACD turret.

Legacy scripting died a death around the turn of the millennium as existing vendors failed to re-architect for the web and to provide extensible and all-encompassing models such that IVR, voice, fulfilment and other business transformation tasks could all be achieved with the same toolset.

Sytel was lucky enough in 2004 to have as a first task for our embryonic scripting solution to develop integrated IVR before a replacement for the traditional agent desktop. This forced us to think long and hard about how to make scripting an all-encompassing tool for real-time contact center processes. This led to a number of design conclusions:

  • An agent is an agent is an agent. Whether human or robot, and dealing with voice, packet media or even no media, the ACD needs to treat all agents equally. This allows sessions of any type to be handled seamlessly between robots and humans.
  • You can never have enough LEGO® bricks. Good scripting allows non-programmers to build contact center flows using the tools at their disposal. Providing a large toolkit is good. Providing a toolkit that can be extended is better.
  • The design of scripting should promote re-use. Write a ‘get-through-the-gatekeeper’ script that works; a good scripting solution should enable reuse of that component. Most modern software re-uses existing good ideas and constructs; we may be dwarves but we stand on the shoulders of giants.
  • The UI layer should be abstracted. In the 14 years since Sytel first produced a scripting product we have been through 4 different web interface technologies. This was only possible through abstraction. The UI landscape changes continuously.

Today Sytel’s Scripter is deployed in many different contact center contexts and continues to grow and evolve.

The magic that this blog’s title implies is simply providing the ability to evolve an application by smart design. This has proven critical to ensuring that, regardless of how the industry’s requirements shift, these can be met without foisting endless upgrades on end-users. It also minimises time-to-market for new end-user applications. Need to integrate an AI bot with a dialog tree application for chat? Simple! If you build new LEGO® bricks this takes days rather than months.

What We Offer

Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) - multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.

Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.

All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.

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Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries

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Best-of-breed performance under compliance

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See and hear exactly how agents are interacting

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Customer Journey Tracking

Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations

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Softdial One™

Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators

Softdial Scripter™

Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications

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Softdial Pathfinder™

Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection

Softdial Media Server™

Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls

Softdial Reporter™ 5

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Comprehensive data output to build your own reports

Softdial Recording Monitor™

Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards

Softdial Campaign Manager™

Automation to optimise any outreach strategy

Softdial Repository™

Central storage and configuration of common resources

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Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer

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By Business Type

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Connect quickly to well equipped agents

Market Research

Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration

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Automated inbound/ outbound blending integrated with any debt management app

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Maximise agent productivity with best-of-breed predictive dialing

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Secure, highly-configurable multichannel communications for excellence in patient care