ACE Release 26.1

Despite being a minor release, Telia ACE 26.1 contains some pretty significant updates. It adds call monitoring, a new video platform and sovereign cloud versions of our next generation IVR and call recording services. Read below for details.

New video platform in Telia ACE

Video chat has many applications that add value to the customer conversation. It has long been a part of Telia ACE, but now, the video platform gets a complete overhaul. The release of ACE 26.1 introduces more features and improvements for your organization, for the agent and for the person contacting you.

For the agent, a new feature is the ability to “pop out” the video to a separate card, making it easier to organize and navigate the ACE Interact workarea. On the end user side, video chat is a part of ACE One Widget published on your website and configurable to suit the needs of your organization. Video chats use the WebRTC standard protocol which means the call works for the end user in any web browser, regardless of device or operating system. Several useful controls are available for the end user, like toggling which camera to use, typically for switching between front and back cameras on a mobile phone.

*Left: agent view in ACE Interact with video popped out to a separate card. Right: end user view with controls for camera, microphone and more.*

All parts of the video service are now produced on a modern, scalable and secure platform hosted by Telia, in our own Nordic datacenters. This ensures high performance, good reliability and compliance with strict rules and policies for privacy.

The initial release is to be considered a beta for testing and demo purposes during a time period. A stable production version will follow shortly. Also
More features, like taking snapshots, sending files between participants and a pen-tool for drawing and highlighting on the shared screen, will be added as the new video service is further developed.

Call monitoring in ACE Coach

Listening in on live calls can be a powerful tool for training and education and serves as a complement to metrics and statistics. Get a deeper insight into conversations, catch nuances and find out what works and what doesn’t. Then use this knowledge for coaching your agents or entire teams.

ACE Coach 26 introduced the possibility to do just that for incoming IVR-calls, and the feature is now live with the release of Telia ACE 26.1. The audio of any agent conversation can be mirrored to any phone number. When the customer call is routed to the agent, the monitoring number is called simultaneously and is added as a listen-only party.

It is easy for the coach (with the proper access rights) to select an agent in the user overview in ACE Coach and activate call monitoring. Either for a time interval, a set number of calls or until manually terminated.

The coach selects an agent in the accounts table to listen in on and sets the desired number of calls and duration (whichever happens first terminates the session unless manually terminated). As an extra safeguard against unauthorized or accidental use, the monitoring phone number must match the one entered by the administrator.

The feature comes with added settings for security and privacy in ACE Coach. Only persons or roles with the correct access rights in ACE are allowed to monitor others, and the monitoring number needs to be added twice. Once in advance by the administrator, and then by coaches themselves when activating a call monitoring session.

A new access function for call monitoring is added. Administrators that assign call monitoring permission need the “own” level and coaches that will use the feature need the “execute” level.

Note: Call monitoring requires your organization to use ACE IVR G2. Combining with ACE Recording G2 works fine.

IVR G2 and Recording G2 produced in Telia sovereign cloud

Privacy and data residency concerns are getting increasingly important topics for many organizations, both in public and private sector. To deliver on this market trend, standard versions of our next generation IVR and recording services, ACE IVR G2 and ACE Recording G2 are typically produced on regionally controlled AWS in Stockholm.

As an option for customers with extra high demands and strict policies concerning use of global cloud platforms, Telia can now provide a complete “in-house” production environment for these ACE services.

This means that the complete services, and all data that passes through it are located within Telia-controlled environments in our Nordic datacenters. All while keeping the benefits of being on a scalable and flexible cloud platform.

Now, these variants of the services can be delivered together with telephony platforms Touchpoint Plus and ACE Voice. ACE IVR G2 produced in the Telia sovereign cloud environment is already available together with Cisco HCS, Mitel MX-One and Siemens/Unify Openscape telephony platforms.