3CX have released the Alpha of their latest update 7. The new Alpha supports Facebook integration and business text messaging for supported SIP providers, as well as vast improvements to the 3CX Live Chat. New reporting capabilities for chat have also been provided as this was highly requested by partners.
Key new features:
- One central location for SMS, FB and Live Chat messages.
- Easy search and filtering of chat conversations.
- Messages received via Facebook, SMS or Live Chat are linked to your CRM.
- New chat reporting including chat performance and abandoned chat reports.
- Queue manager capabilities extended to monitor / whisper during live chat.
Update 7 allows you to integrate 3CX chat with Facebook, meaning no chats will be missed. Extensions can be set for queue and group-based communication, with the ability to have an individual take over a chat – much like taking a call and speaking one to one with the customer. This new functionality can be monitored as well as reported on for group managers.
New chat messages can be linked to existing CRM systems so your agents know exactly who they are chatting with. This allows the server to automatically match up the details that are entered by the customer, against the personal / business contacts in the CRM. When a contact is matched, an agent can review key points from past conversations to quickly familiarise themselves with what the customer has previous enquired around. With the Facebook chat integration, 3CX will show an agent the profile details including the customer’s photo, first and last name.
The new and improved Live Chat box has a refreshed UI with additional improvements to security. Queue managers also have the ability to join a Live Chat and listen, whisper or barge in matching the functionality that is present for audio call queues. There are also new chat reports to assist customer engagement:
- Queue chat performance: Identify the performance of queues for a specified date range to help you adjust agent scheduling and capacity.
- Queue agents’ chat statistics: Check statistics of specific agents in any queue, for a specified date range in order to review their performance.
- Abandoned chats: Lists unanswered messages on the various channels. The contact information of these customer messages is shown on the report for easy reference.
Beyond the new chat capabilities, 3CX have added quality of life improvements for Management Console users:
- PUSH notifications which fail to deliver, are now logged in the event log and reported for the administrator to review.
- Failed SMS messages are also reported as a Warning Event to the administrator, including the reason for failure.
- Added a new system wide option (by default turned off), which can hide CRM contacts from the 3CX Apps Company Phonebook.
- Added ability to delete old/unsupported firmware files to free up disk space.
- Added ability to delete WAV Files from the Management Console.
Of course, this Alpha is not recommended to be run on a production system and is only for testing purposes. What do you think of the Alpha so far? Let us know your feedback! We are now awaiting the Beta – stay tuned.
