Disruption Management

Aimed at utility providers, disruption management makes it possible to keep customers informed of disruptions in service. This is done by playing IVR prompts to callers from an area experiencing a disruption in service.

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 information (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.

Object Types

New Object Types have been added for disruption management: Disruption Event, Disruption Item, and Disruption Set.

The following default roles have full user rights to these objects:

  • Queue Administrator
  • IVR Administrator

In addition, User Administrator has rights to Disruption Event.

Note: You can select the Disruption Set for which you want to assign rights.

Importing and Exporting Disruption Items

Disruption Items have been added as an import and export option in System Configurator (System Tools > Import/Export). See System Configurator and Disruption Management documents for more information on the import file.

In addition, External ID has been added to the prompt info view (Queue Management > Prompt Management > Prompts) as a field and to the list view search criteria and columns. The external ID can be used to identify the prompt, for example, when importing the same prompt into several Sinch Contact Center systems.

Example IVR

An example disruption IVR application (Example_Disruption_IVR.xml) can be used as a basis and modified according to needs. To get the example file, contact Sinch.

API

An interface has been added for creating, editing, and deleting disruption events used by the IVR.

The interface enables integration into the utility provider’s system(s). For more information, see Sinch Contact Center Restful Configuration Interface documentation.