You are here:
Service Cloud Voice Key Concepts
When you’re using Service Cloud Voice, it’s helpful to understand the terms we use to talk about telephony.
Required Editions
| View supported editions. |
- Bring Your Own Channel for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
- A Salesforce messaging channel type that allows you to bring messaging services from your CCaaS provider to a Service Cloud Voice contact center.
- CCaaS Provider
- The provider of the back-end contact center as a service (CCaaS) system integrated with Service Cloud Voice. This is your telephony provider or the Bring Your Own Channel contact center system. Your CCaaS provider manages its own separate infrastructure. By default, Service Cloud Voice uses Amazon Connect as its telephony provider, and you can add more CCaaS features through Service Cloud Contact Center with Amazon Connect. Other CCaaS partners provide telephony and messaging integrations for Salesforce.
- Connected App
- When you create a Service Cloud Voice contact center with Amazon Connect, Salesforce
creates two connected apps for you and
assigns a connected app permission set to your contact center admins. These apps are used
behind the scenes, so you don’t usually need to open or update them.
- Single Sign-On Connected App. The first connected app is used for single sign-on (SSO). Users need a custom permission set to use SSO to log into Voice and the associated Amazon Connect instance. The app’s name is your contact center name followed by Connected App—for example, ContactCenterWest Connected App.Salesforce automatically adds the SSO connected app to the Service Cloud Voice permission set, and assigns the permission set to all users selected as contact center admins when the center was created. If more users need access to the SSO connected app, select their user profile in the app’s settings. If new contact center admins are added to the contact center in the future, they’re automatically assigned the permission set.
- REST API OAuth Connected App. The second connected app is used for REST API OAuth. It allows the Amazon Connect Lambda functions, which are used by the Amazon Connect contact flows, to create and update records in your org. Its name is your contact center name followed by Connected App for REST API OAuth—for example, ContactCenterWest Connected App for REST API OAuth.
- If you’re using your own telephony provider with Service Cloud Voice, configure your own connected apps and SSO.
- Contact Center
- Represents the reps and supervisors providing customer service with Service Cloud Voice. If you create a Voice contact center with Amazon Connect, Salesforce creates an Amazon Connect instance and two Salesforce connected apps for you. You can have multiple contact centers, with each typically representing a geographic region—for example, one for the US and another for EMEA.
- IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
- A telephony menu system that helps callers navigate to the right department in your contact
center. If you’re using Amazon Connect as your telephony provider, customize your IVR by
working with its two key ingredients: Lambda functions and contact flows.
- A contact flow is a sequence of steps that determine how customers interact with your contact center. Salesforce provides sample contact flows that you can use to configure inbound, outbound, and transferred call flows.
- A Lambda function is a small piece of code used in Amazon Connect to configure your phone
system’s IVR. Salesforce provides several Lambda functions for use in your Service
Cloud Voice contact flows. These functions are used by the sample contact flows, and
you can also use them in custom contact flows.
The Lambda functions provided by Salesforce perform these actions:
- Create a voice call record in Salesforce
- Start real-time transcription
- Save transcripts to Salesforce
- Sync data between a contact record (previously called contact trace record or CTR) and a VoiceCall record
- Invoke the Salesforce REST API to perform create, read, update, and delete operations on Salesforce records such as cases, accounts, or custom objects
To learn more about the Lambda functions that Salesforce provides, see Lambda functions.
- Phone Number Porting
- Connecting your existing phone number or numbers to work with your new contact center.
To learn how porting works with Amazon Connect, see Port Your Current Phone
Number.
Phone number porting is highly regulated, and requires you to submit a porting request with your telephony provider many weeks in advance. To avoid any anxiety about the porting timeline, we recommend that you claim a new phone number for testing and production, and forward traffic to that number from your original production phone number until testing is complete. Then, port the original production phone number from your previous telephony provider to your new one.
- Service Cloud Real Time
- A microservice for handling real time communication events which are high volume in nature. This microservice is essential for operating both Service Cloud Voice and Bring Your Own Channel messaging services.
- Salesforce Core
- Most users log in and interact with the Salesforce core application. All the rep experience, supervisor experience, and admin experiences are all built in Salesforce Core.
- Softphone
- A software-based phone that reps access from a computer. The softphone interface resembles a regular phone, with a dialpad and call buttons, but it offers extra functions like the ability to transfer callers to another rep or queue, mute your line, and place a caller on hold. Reps can use the softphone in the Omni-Channel utility’s Phone tab with Voice.
- Telephony Provider
- The provider of the back-end telephony service integrated with Service Cloud Voice. By default, Service Cloud Voice uses Amazon Connect as its telephony provider. Amazon Connect’s features include intelligent cloud telephony and cloud contact center features like IVR, call routing and storage, and real-time call transcription. As an alternative, you can choose to implement Voice with a different telephony provider or integrate your own Amazon Connect instance with Voice.
Did this article solve your issue?
Let us know so we can improve!
