Getting Started

Introduction

This document describes the disruption management feature in Sinch Contact Pro and instructs in setting it up. The document is intended for administrators who configure the feature into use and for users who create, edit, and delete disruption events in the Dashboard application.

What is Disruption Management?

Disruption management enables utility providers to keep their customers informed of outages in service. Utility providers have a database for storing information on disruptions. As a disruption occurs, information is updated to Sinch Contact Pro, which then automatically informs affected customers about the disruption and its expected resolution time by IVR as they call in. This enables utility providers to keep their contact center agents available for calls from unaffected areas during a known disruption.

As a customer calls in, Sinch Contact Pro enables recognizing the area they are calling from, for example based on the customer’s DTMF input (such as a postal code) or a search from the utility provider’s CRM system through the SOAP interface.

Terminology

Disruption Event: Data related to a disruption or outage which prevents providing a service to an end customer. For example, an electricity outage in a region.

Disruption Item: A disruption event contains three disruption items:

• Where: the location, area, or service affected
• Why: the reason for the disruption
• When: an estimated time when service will return to normal

Each disruption item can contain either a pre-recorded IVR prompt or text-to-speech (IVRTalk) generated info (such as postal codes or times).

Disruption Set: A collection of related disruption items and events. Each item and event belongs to a set. Using several disruption sets may be relevant if the company provides several different utilities, for example, both electricity and gas.