Apologies in advance as this question is a little broad.
My organisation is planning to deploy PureCloud later this year and we're hoping for a way to present some simple customer information to agents on inbound calls without querying another system. This will be temporary until we implement a CRM.
I know we can query our existing systems with web services, but I was hoping there is a way to store some basic information directly in PureCloud (e.g. phone number, account number, first name, maybe one or two other attributes) and display it to an agent. I've looked at External Contacts but it seems to be limited to name and contact info.
Would any of the following be feasible?:
-- Using the "external system URI" external contact field to store our arbitrary information and look it up in a call flow?
-- Storing the info in an external contact note and look it up in a call flow?
-- Potentially using PureCloud's document management to store a simple contacts file (e.g. a comma separated text file) and somehow look it up dynamically in a call flow (realise that's a bit of a reach)?
Or more importantly, can anyone recommend any better options?
As far as out of the box solutions go, External Contacts is your best bet, though it isn't a great fit for what you're trying to do, as you've seen.
The best way to do this would be look the information up in the IVR, store it as participant attributes, and display those attributes using a Script. Alternatively, you could do the same lookup in the script instead of the IVR; Data Actions are available in both places. This would require you to have a REST web service that can serve the data via JSON objects.
If I did want to use External Contacts, could I potentially base64 encode a series of attributes as a JSON array and store that as the value for "externalSystemURI"? I gather it would require doing a base64 decode as part of the response configuration to get the attributes back - is that possible?
If you're consuming the data via the API, I don't see any issue with that. The PureCloud UI will continue to show the encoded data though, so that part of the user experience would be suboptimal.