Call Supervision

Call supervision functionality is designed to enable contact center managers to monitor agent DNs, and it also enables agents to invite their supervisors to the call when dealing with a customer. T-Server supports the Standard Call Supervision architecture where supervisors and agents are located on the same site.

There are two types of call supervision that T-Server supports:

• Subscription monitoring enables supervisors to subscribe and monitor one agent DN. If the subscription is active, T-Server automatically invites the supervisor to all calls where the agent DN participates. T-Server stops working in this mode when the subscription is cancelled.
• Assistance monitoring is activated by an agent by issuing an assistance request sent to the supervisor. The agent can issue this while he or she is on a call with a customer.

Supervision Modes

Call supervision is performed in three different modes:

• Silent monitoring hides the supervisor’s presence from all call participants, including the monitored DN for the agent who is the target of the supervisor’s attention.
• Whisper coaching hides the supervisor’s presence from all call participants but the monitored agent. Only the agent can hear the supervisor.
• Open supervisor presence invites the supervisor to the call through subscription or assistance call supervision scenarios, but all call participants are aware of the supervisor’s presence and can hear the conversation.

The supervisor can choose any of these three modes for the call supervision subscription, but the agent can only use the last two modes for an assistance request.

Supervision Scopes

The call supervision scope specifies the time frame when the supervisor must participate in the call. There are two supervision scopes available:

• Agent scope allows the supervisor to monitor the agent. The supervisor joins the call when the call is established on the agent’s monitored DN. The supervisor leaves the call immediately after the agent leaves the call.
• Call scope allows the supervisor to control the customer’s experience. The supervisor joins the call when the call is established on the agent’s monitored DN, or when the supervisor receives the assistance request from the agent. T-Server keeps the supervisor as part of the call as long as either a customer or monitored agent remains in the call.

The supervisor can choose either of these scopes for the monitoring subscription.

An assistance request issued by the agent does not specify the supervision scope, so the scope always contains the call value. Therefore, if a supervisor is invited to a call through an assistance request, she will stay on the call until the call is finished.

Supervision Types

The call supervision type specifies the number of calls to be monitored—either one call or all calls.

• If one call is chosen for the subscription, the subscription is cancelled automatically when the supervisor finishes monitoring the first call on the monitored DN.
• If all calls is chosen for the subscription, the supervisor must cancel the subscription manually when he or she wants to stop monitoring the agent’s calls.

The call supervision type cannot be specified for an assistance request. The one call type is always used when call supervision is initiated through an assistance request. The type cannot be changed through the configuration settings.

Monitoring Session

A monitoring session is the process in which a supervisor listens to an agent customer conversation. There are two types of monitoring sessions that are defined by the session creation scenario:

• A subscription session is created by T-Server automatically when a call is delivered to an agent’s DN using the existing call supervision subscription.
• An assistance session is created as a result of the assistance request sent by an agent to a supervisor.

A monitoring session of any type must be initialized with the following three parameters when it is created:

• Supervision type
• Supervision mode
• Supervision scope

These parameters in the subscription session are initialized with the values of the corresponding parameters in the subscription from which this session was derived. An assistance session uses information passed in the assistance request and includes some configuration parameters for the initialization purpose.

A monitoring session begins when a supervisor joins a call, and ends when the supervisor disconnects from the call.

A call received by an agent can have monitoring sessions of both types, which are active at the same time. Each monitoring session is uniquely identified by the supervisor involved. As a result, the supervisor can participate in only one monitoring session at a time, but one agent can be part of multiple monitoring sessions where one of the sessions is subscription-based and other sessions are assistance request-based.

The following example demonstrates how multiple monitoring sessions are created in one call:

• Agent1 answers an incoming call and Supervisor1 is invited to the call based on the existing subscription.
• Agent1 sends an assistance request to Supervisor2 who also joins the call.

This call has two monitoring sessions active at the same time: the first session has a subscription type, and the second session is an assistance session.

Intrusion

Intrusion occurs when a supervisor activates a new call supervision subscription to monitor an agent who is currently on a call. T-Server creates the requested subscription and immediately invites the supervisor to join the existing call.

Note the specific T-Server behavior in the following scenario:

1. A supervisor selects Agent1 for monitoring.
2. An inbound call is routed to Agent2.
3. Agent2 transfers (two-step operation) the call to Agent1.
4. Agent1 answers and handles the call.
5. The supervisor is not notified about this call.

Monitoring Consultation Calls

T-Server supports the monitoring of consultation calls made to or from a DN under call supervision. This feature is disabled by default. To enable this feature, use the option monitor-consult-calls.

Switching Between Supervision Modes

A supervisor can switch between any supervision modes as follows:

• To switch from any mode to connect (or open supervision), the supervisor uses a TSetMuteOff request.
• To switch from any mode to mute, the supervisor uses a TSetMuteOn request.
• To switch from mute to coach, the supervisor uses a TSetMuteOff request with the MonitorMode=coach extension key.
• To switch from connect to coach, the supervisor uses a TSetMuteOn request with the MonitorMode=coach extension key.

When a supervisor changes the supervision mode using the TSetMuteOff or TSetMuteOn request, T-Server generates an EventMuteOn/EventMuteOff message with the MonitorMode key in AttributeExtensions to the supervisor and agent DNs, and all of subscribed T-Library clients.

Switching between supervision modes can be performed only during an established supervision call (with a supervisor present on the call), and from the same supervisor DN from which the TMonitorNextCall request was sent.

Support Notes:

• This feature is supported for Assistance Supervision, and for both monitoring scopes agent and call.
• This feature depends on support by specific versions of Workspace Desktop or a T-Library client. Consult corresponding documentation for the availability of this new feature in those components.

To enable switching between supervision modes, set the No results option to true.

Call Supervision Configuration

Subscription

Call supervision subscription is controlled by two T-Library requests:

• TMonitorNextCall
• TCancelMonitoring

The supervisor’s desktop must be able to process these two requests to perform call supervision. The first request creates a new subscription, and the second request cancels the existing subscription. These requests use AttributeThisDN to identify the supervisor and AttributeOtherDN to identify the monitored agent DN.

Subscription Creation

T-Server creates a new subscription based on the TMonitorNextCall request from the supervisor. The request is either accepted or rejected.

T-Server rejects the request in the following scenarios:

• The supervisor or the monitored agent DN already has an active subscription.

However, if the TMonitorNextCall request tries to activate a monitoring subscription that is already active (for example, the supervisor who submitted this request is already set up to monitor the agent), T-Server responds with standard EventMonitoringNextCall messages sent to the agent and supervisor DNs. This request is not rejected, because it does not create multiple subscriptions on one DN.

• The supervisor or the agent DN is not configured in the Configuration Layer.

If the request is accepted, T-Server creates a new subscription and initializes it with the type, mode, and scope information that was defined in the request.

This information is part of the request as the following attributes:

• AttributeMonitorNextCallType, which defines the type of call supervision. Its possible values are MonitorOneCall and MonitorAllCalls.
• AttributeExtensions/MonitorMode, which defines the mode of call supervision. Its possible values are normal, mute, coach, and connect.
• AttributeExtensions/MonitorScope, which defines the scope of call supervision. Its possible values are call and agent.

If one or both of the monitoring extensions are missing or incorrect, the following values are used:

• default-monitor-scope for MonitorScope
• default-monitor-mode for MonitorMode

T-Server confirms the new subscription for both the supervisor and the agent by sending an EventMonitoringNextCall message to both destinations. This event always contains AttributeExtensions that include both monitoring extensions. These extensions represent the monitoring configuration for a new subscription.

Notes:

• T-Server identifies the agent to whom call supervision will be applied by the agent DN specified in the OtherDN attribute of the TMonitorNextCall request. The agent’s login ID is not used for this purpose. In particular, this means that T-Server does not try to identify the agent who is logged in on the monitored DN, or to analyze the agent’s state to decide if supervision should be activated for a call. T-Server monitors calls made to or from the specified DN, regardless of the person using this DN, until supervision scope expires.

Subscription Cancellation

T-Server can cancel active subscriptions using the following methods:

• Manual, where a supervisor submits a TCancelMonitoring request.
• Automatic, where T-Server cancels the subscription when a MonitorOneCall-type monitoring session is terminated.

A supervisor can submit a TCancelMonitoring request at any time. T-Server identifies a subscription by the pair of supervisor and agent DNs. If this subscription exists, then it will be cancelled. Otherwise, T-Server returns an EventError message.

T-Server generates EventMonitoringCancelled events for both the supervisor and the agent to inform them that the subscription was cancelled.

Assistance Request

An assistance request is a TSingleStepConference request containing the AssistMode parameter in the extensions. T-Server creates a new monitoring session based on the assistance request, but a monitoring subscription is not created. The AssistMode extension is identical to the MonitorMode extension used in the TMonitorNextCall request. The difference is that AssistMode can contain only the connect and coach values. There are no parameters to define the scope and type of monitoring in an assistance request, so the following monitoring parameters are used:

• MonitorScope set to call
• MonitorType set to MonitorOneCall

These two settings are hard-coded and cannot be changed.

Supervisor Auto-release

Depending on the type of monitoring scope and mode, T-Server determines whether to release a supervisor from the call. If the monitoring scope is agent, T-Server releases the supervisor from the call at the same time that the monitored agent leaves the call. If the monitoring scope is call and the other party of the call is aware of the supervisor’s presence on the call and can hear this supervisor, T-Server does not release the supervisor from the call.

Hiding Supervisor Presence

A supervisor who is performing silent monitoring or whisper coaching must be hidden from other call participants. If the scenario involves whisper coaching, only the monitored agent (who can hear the supervisor) must be aware of his or her presence on the call.

Call participants receive information about other participants joining or leaving the call from the corresponding T-Library events distributed by T-Server. Supervisor presence is not shown to any new participant joining the call. The T-Library desktop applications used by call center employees must be able to process T-Library events and indicate recent changes in a call status. For example, they can show that new participant has just joined or left the call.

Hiding a supervisor’s presence means filtering out any events that inform other participants about the supervisor's activity. T-Server inserts specific information into the T-Library events that allow T-Library clients to decide if a particular event must be shown to the customer or it must be suppressed. T-Server makes modifications to the events if at least one monitoring session is active on a call. The following attributes support this functionality:

• AttributeCallState
• AttributeOtherDNRole
• AttributeThirdPartyDN
• AttributeThirdPartyDNRole

The details on how those attributes are modified are found in the Genesys Events and Models Reference

Configuration Options

The following T-Server Application-level options support call supervision functionality:

• cancel-monitor-on-disconnect
• default-monitor-mode
• default-monitor-scope
• intrusion-enabled
• monitor-internal-calls
• monitor-consult-calls

Feature Limitations

The following known limitations currently apply to call supervision:

• A supervisor participating in a monitoring session should not initiate a 1pcc or 3pcc call transfer or conference call because this can change either the supervisor’s status in the conference call or the status of a new party added to the call because of the conference or transfer.
• If a supervisor is already engaged in a call when an agent DN that it is targeting joins a new call (which requires monitoring), T-Server does not invite the supervisor to monitor the new agent conversation. Even if the supervisor disconnects from its current call, the monitoring session for the new agent conversation will not start. T-Server will activate monitoring for the next call on the targeted DN. This limitation is applied to supervision initiated through subscription monitoring (MonitorMode) and does not apply to the assistance monitoring (AssistMode).
• Supervision is not supported for Instant Messaging (IM) calls.