Quiq Implementation Guide

Introduction

Quiq Messaging can be implemented in as quickly as a few days for a basic implementation and over a few weeks for a more extensive implementation that takes advantage of the full feature set and integration options available in Quiq.

Quiq Messaging is designed to be simple to get up and running while also supporting the deep integration requirements of large enterprises. Quiq Messaging can also be implemented in phases, for instance first going live with just SMS and no UI Extensions or webhook integrations. Additional messaging platforms (e.g. Facebook Messenger) and integrations (e.g. UI Extensions or webhooks) can be added at any time.

Although there are a number of considerations during implementation, you shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. Your Quiq Implementation team will be there throughout the process to guide you and make sure everything goes smoothly and on schedule.

How, When & Where to Offer Quiq Messaging

The first step in the implementation of Quiq Messaging is to consider all the touchpoints that you currently have with your customers, and how messaging could be added to those touchpoints.

The obvious first considerations are How, When and Where to offer Quiq Messaging on your desktop and mobile websites. In addition, you should also consider less obvious, but equally valuable opportunities to offer messaging to your customers such as outbound SMS notifications, marketing campaigns (email and Facebook) and Voice/IVR .

Quiq Messaging in Your Desktop Website

When initially considering how to add Quiq Messaging to your web presence, the focus is often on the mobile website. However, the desktop version of your website should not be overlooked.

Your customers may be sitting in front of their computer, but their mobile phone will never be far away and they would rather message your company than make a phone call or send an email. Your desktop website should be updated to offer customers the option to text everywhere that you display your phone number and on every Contact Us page. This can be as simple as updating the label in the places where you currently display your phone number to offer the option to text as well as call.

In addition, you should also update the Contact area of your website to specifically offer each messaging channel. On desktop websites we recommend displaying modal dialogs for SMS or Facebook Messenger. Although these messaging platforms are not fully available from desktop, your users may still prefer to use them from their mobile phones.

To include social messaging channels, you can present your website users a Message Us link that directs them to your company's Facebook Messenger desktop web interface. The Facebook Messenger url is https://www.messenger.com/t/page_id where page_id is either the numeric id for your company page or the mnemonic page id. Learn more

Web Chat provides desktop users with an immediate connection to your messaging agents. The ubiquity of web based chat assures that the majority of users will easily recognize and engage via the channel when it is available.

Quiq has a prepackaged SDK available to make adding web chat to your site very simple. See Legacy Quiq Chat or Conversation Starter for details. Web Chat is not advised for mobile sites due to the limited screen size and the fact that SMS is the defacto standard for mobile messaging.

Ultimately, how you decide to implement the UI is a matter for you and your designers, but the key thing is to make your messaging channels available to the users on your desktop website!

Quiq Messaging in Your Mobile Website

Since mobile users are already comfortable using messaging apps on their phones to interact with family and friends, contacting your company using messaging will feel very natural. However, since messaging is an emerging channel for business-to-consumer communications many consumers may not know that they can contact you via messaging. Therefore it will be necessary to prominently feature the messaging call to action.

Mobile browsers make it easy to link directly from your mobile site to messaging apps. On your mobile site, the following URLs can be used to invoke the native messaging apps on your users’ phones.

SMS

<a href=”sms:your_text_enabled_number”>

The number should be numbers only, without punctuation or spaces. Be sure to prefix the phone number with the country code (e.g. +1 for the US) so that it works from international mobile phones.

Facebook Messenger

<a href=”https://www.messenger.com/t/page_id>”>

Where page_id is either the numeric id for your company page or the mnemonic page id.

In addition to adding messaging options to your mobile website, you should also consider removing web chat. The user experience of web chat on a mobile device is not nearly as good as the native messaging capabilities that your customers are already familiar with.

Also, web chat on mobile is not integrated with the camera. This makes sending images and video difficult, if it is even supported. Since your users are already comfortable using the messaging apps on their mobile device, we recommend that you replace web chat with messaging on your mobile website.

Offering Quiq Messaging Based Upon Agent Availability

Quiq Messaging has the ability to queue new incoming conversations when there are no agents available or all agents are busy. In this case, you can configure Quiq messaging to send an auto response to indicate that no agents are available, and inform your customers of your hours of service.

However, a better user experience may be to not offer messaging at all when there are no agents available to handle incoming conversations. Quiq Messaging has a REST API that can be called by your website to determine whether to offer the messaging call to action. This API will cover both the out of hours case in which there are no agents available and also when all agents have reached their maximum capacity to handle conversations.

Quiq Messaging in IVR

Phone calls are the most expensive way to serve your customers since an agent can serve only one customer at a time. Significant cost savings can be achieved by providing your customers the opportunity to SMS message instead. Messaging also has the highest customer satisfaction, so redirecting phone calls to messaging is a win-win, lower costs and higher satisfaction!

Here’s an example of how you could offer messaging from your IVR:

*"Thanks for calling. All agents are currently busy. Your expected wait time is 5 minutes. You can continue to hold or an agent can help you using text messaging on your phone. Please press 1 to use text messaging."

• *Customer Presses 1
• *"We will text you at your current number. Press 1 to use this number or 2 to choose a different number."
• *Customer Presses 1
• *"An agent will text you shortly. Please watch for the text message on your phone. Goodbye."
• To transition the customer contact from a voice phone call to text, Quiq Messaging provides a REST API endpoint that can be used to start an SMS conversation. This API can be called by your IVR to implement the above.

Quiq Messaging and SMS Notifications

If your company is currently sending SMS notifications out to customers such as order status, confirmations or marketing SMS messages you should consider using Quiq Messaging to turn these one directional messages into two-way conversations. This enables your customers to reply to these notifications and be directly connected to an agent in your company, who will then have access the full context of the notification content. Consumers may not be aware that they can reply to the notification so it’s imperative that you update the content of the message to indicate that you’re available to accept replies.

In order to receive replies in Quiq Messaging from your outbound SMS messages, it is necessary that the outbound messages be sent from our SMS gateway. If you are not interested in switching SMS gateways, another alternative is to say something like “Please text us at xxx-xxx-xxxx for more information” in your outbound SMS messages. Although this user experience is not perfectly seamless, it’s not as bad as you may initially think since the consumer will be able to click on the number provided in the notification to send a message through the number hot-linking capabilities of their mobile device.

Quiq Messaging as a Call to Action in Email and Facebook Marketing Campaigns

When considering opportunities to use Quiq Messaging, don’t overlook your outbound marketing communications. All the reasons that make messaging a great choice for customer service also make it a great choice as a call to action in a marketing campaign.

For email campaigns, include the option to text you using the same techniques that were described earlier for your website.

If your company advertises on Facebook, you should also consider using Facebook Messenger as a call to action on your Facebook ads, a capability that has been recently introduced by Facebook. Instead of using a link in the ad, you can specify that the call to action in the ad be a link to Messenger to start a conversation.

Integration into Internal Systems via Quiq UI Extensions

While an agent is engaged in a conversation with a customer, it is often useful to have information from other internal systems immediately available in the Quiq agent UI. For example, it may be useful to display information about the customer from an internal customer database. Or, in an e-Commerce setting, it may be useful to show order status if the customer sends in an order number. For use cases such as these (and many more), you can use the Quiq UI Extension SDK to add your own custom extensions to the Quiq Messaging agent UI.

UI Extensions reside on the right hand side of the Quiq Messaging agent UI. Multiple UI extensions can be added at once, and different extensions can be enabled or disabled for specific agents depending on their needs. A UI Extension is just a web application that resides inside an iFrame in the Quiq UI, so you can do anything that you are already able to do in a web page, including displaying information from other systems as well as creating links to open other applications in different tabs or browser windows. Each extension can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be, from a single page of HTML to a complex application built in your favorite modern framework, giving you unlimited options for customizing Quiq Messaging for your organziation.

An event-based model links the Quiq Messaging UI to the UI Extensions that you create. You can pass in javascript methods that you want to be called whenever certain events occur in Quiq Messaging, such as when a conversation starts or when a new message arrives. Additionally, the SDK exposes several methods allowing your extension to dispatch certain actions in the Quiq Messaging UI, such as preparing a message for the agent. These features allow you to build a rich UI integration that works seamlessly with the Quiq UI.

For more information about UI Extensions, please refer to our UI Extensions Documentation.

Sending Quiq Messaging Data to Other Systems

There are a variety of reasons that you may want to send Quiq conversation data to other systems:
BI dashboards and reporting
Display boards in the contact center
Agent quality management & compliance
Workforce Management
Recording customer service interactions in a customer master database
The full details of each conversation are made available, including all the details of any associated collaborations, the chat transcript, and timestamps of all messages and events that occurred during the conversation (e.g. transferred, re-queued, etc).

Quiq uses webhooks to send the conversation details to you. For example, the ConversationStatusChanged webhook is called on any conversation state change (e.g. new, inactive, end), and a JSON encoded object will be POSTed to an application endpoint running on your servers. For detailed information about the webhook and the JSON payload, as well as other data Quiq offers through its API, please refer to the documentation.

Quiq Messaging Implementation Details

Now that we’ve introduced the options that need to be considered when planning to implement Quiq Messaging, let’s discuss the steps necessary to get Quiq Messaging up and running for your organization.

Quiq will create a Quiq Messaging site for your company to use. In order to create this site, we need to know the type of authentication that will be used for the site. The following are available:
Standalone – Users will be managed natively within Quiq. In this case, the name and email address of the site administrator will be needed.
Oracle RightNow – Use Oracle Service Cloud as the source for Single Sign On (SSO) authorization.
Salesforce – Use Salesforce as the source for SSO authorization.
Zendesk – Use Zendesk as the source for SSO authorization.
In order to associate the Quiq Messaging site with each of the desired messaging platforms, the following steps must be completed.

Connecting Quiq Messaging to SMS

We recommend that you add SMS to your existing local or toll-free number so that users who have stored your company’s phone number can now also text the same number. Please note that when adding SMS to an existing local phone number or toll-free number, it is not possible for that number to support MMS (multimedia). To overcome this limitation Quiq will also provision (at no charge) phone numbers for your company’s use that support both SMS and MMS. When using an anchor tag and not visibly displaying the phone number in your website we recommend using the Quiq provisioned SMS/MMS number. When one of your customers texts your existing local or toll-free number, Quiq will automatically switch the text conversation over to a MMS enabled number.

In order to enable SMS on an existing local phone number or toll-free number a Letter of Authorization will need to be executed by your company. The process to SMS enable an existing number takes 1-4 weeks.

Connecting Quiq Messaging to Facebook Messenger

Quiq associates a custom Facebook app for your Facebook page to route messages sent to and from your Facebook page into a Quiq conversation, enabling agents to use a common interface across multiple messaging platforms. To allow the association, a Facebook page admin must also have a Quiq Admin account. The Quiq account may be removed after the association process if desired.

Connecting Quiq Messaging to Kik

Quiq Messaging acts as a Bot in Kik terminology. Instructions for creating the Kik Bot may be found at Kik Setup.

Quiq Messaging Configuration

After the Quiq Messaging site has been created and the site has been connected to the messaging platforms, the final step is to configure the site. Site configuration is done through the Admin UI in collaboration with your Quiq Implementation team and includes the following simple steps:
Configure queues and routing – depending upon the number of contact points and the skills of your agents, queues and routing will be set up to ensure incoming conversations are properly integrated into your workflow.
Configure auto-responses – you’ll want to configure the auto-responses that are sent from the system for various events (e.g. No Agents Available) to reflect your company’s brand and voice.
Configure parameters – there are a number of configuration parameters that you’ll want to review and set, including the number of simultaneous conversations an agent can handle, SLA and Adaptive Response Time parameters and queue sizes.
Create Users and Assign Roles – if your site is integrated with another system for Single Sign On, it is not necessary to create users/passwords in Quiq Messaging. They will be created automatically when the users logs in. However, for those users who should have Manager or Admin privileges, it will be necessary to set those privileges within the Quiq Admin page.