Welcome to the Expedia Group Contact Center as a Service Conversations Platform

CCaaS capabilities

The Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) Conversations Platform describes a set of capabilities that can be leveraged by any application to intelligently connect any agent (human or virtual) to any traveler or supplier across any channel.

The (CCaaS) capabilities are responsible for implementing intelligent routing. As such, CCaaS handles the management of human agents as conversation participants, and is capable of combining partner-defined business policies with learned agent productivity information, to make intelligent routing decisions.

The CCaaS Conversations Platform is powered by contextual data feedback loops between agents, suppliers, and travelers and supports all Expedia Group products and stages of travel.

Architecture

The diagram below provides a high-level view of the Contact Center as a Service (CCaas) architecture, including the primary services and applications that comprise the CCaaS platform, and the interactions between these components that provide the CCaaS platform capabilities.

The CCaaS Conversations Platform is organized in a tiered approach, with each tier providing specific capabilities to the tiers above.

Applications tier

Starting at the top of the diagram, are the Conversations Platform Applications. The applications are a specific set of services that allows the partner to perform specific tasks. Expedia's CP applications include:

Contact Center Management Console lets the partner create and manage their contact center and agents, agent tools, admin users, smart routing, phone numbers, voice experiences and related rules and policies.
Voyager Next is a complete Agent Tool (Voyager Next) that is comprised of pluggable components, including a Virtual Agent that can also be easily configured and integrated into any agent tool.
Softphone is an embeddable web based software telephone that enables agents to receive or make phone calls, and perform call controls like mute, hold, hang up over webRTC. Softphone has been designed such that it can be easily plugged into any web application with minimal development effort.
Analytics Console is a one stop-destination for accessing, creating, and sharing reports.

Front-end services tier

After the Applications tier, is the front-end services. These services enable the partner to onboard to the Converations Platform.

API Gateway provides secure and controlled access to the Conversation Platform.
Resource Manager is used by parters to configure and customize the Conversation Platform.
- The Resource Manager also provides a provider model that implements a grammar representing the entities (for example partners, products, services, users, agents, skills, business policies, and routing rules) on the platform. This enables partners to plug into the semantics of resources create, read, update, and delete operations.
- The Resource Manager surfaces all Conversation Platform Resources behind a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) authorization model.

Channels tier

Below the front-end services tier is the Channels model that natively supports multiple channels and is primarily tasked with surfacing a provider model to enable flexibility in channel technology selection (e.g. selecting amongst different voice providers) and normalizing the message flow over conversations from different types of channels.

One benefit of multi-channel support is that Virtual Agent Skills are created to be context-aware, and as such can provide custom user experiences over different channels.

Voice Channel provides integration for traditional telephony and voice assistance, as well as automation for travelers, suppliers and agents.

Workforce optimization tier

Workforce optimization assists the partner in pinpointing areas of excellence and call out improvements to help replicate successful interactions and identify actionable feedback.

Data intelligence tier

Data Intelligence (DI) provides a cohesive view of what's happening across self-service and agent experiences in any channel or tool on the platform.

The DI capability uses real-time and historical data collection and enrichment to seamlessly integrate with other data signals (including identity, fraud, clickstreams, etc) and surface strategic insights with out-of-box dashboards and data exploration tools and programmatic API access.

This capability is built on top of the AI and Data Platform tier. The main application from DI to extract data is the Analytics Console application.

Agent identity tier

Agent identity is responsible for the authentication and authorization to support Single Sign-On (SSO) that integrates into any provider and provides additional meta data to support routing and reporting.

Smart Omni-Channel routing tier

Smart Omni-Channel routing assists the partners in connecting customers to the most suitable human agent, with full context of the customer's unresolved intent, on any of the platform supported channels.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data tier

The bottom level of the architecture diagram is the AI and Data Platform. The AI and Data Platform provide a wide range of data and intelligence services used to power the AI capabilities of the Conversation Platform.

Where to go next

The documentation hosted in this portal is organized into the following sections:

Capabilities

This section provides an overview of the core capabilities, applications and services that administrators and developers can use to create their organization resources onto the Conversation Platform and subsequently customize their services according to their preferences

Additional reference material

Looking for the Conversations Platform documentation?