Summer Season Updates
This week at Call Theory
Before we dig in, here's what's going on at Call Theory this week (and pretty much every week, as a general reminder):
- Tuesday, 3pm Eastern - Office hours for call centers
- Thursday, 12pm Eastern - Scripting sessions for Intelligent Series
Office Hours is a place to bring any technical or scripting topic you can think of and work or talk through it together with Call Theory in a group setting with other customers.
Scripting Sessions teaches Intelligent Series scripting and follows a defined schedule, but we work through any attendee questions first! This week's session covers our Basic Assessment.
Mission Control Updates
Call Theory is publishing the latest Mission Control dashboard updates for customers this week, and we wanted to share some of those changes!
Personal Dashboard
The Personal Dashboard has a new streamlined agent activity feed. The Personal Dashboard is configured by linking a Call Theory user account with an Intelligent Series agtID, automatically enabling a personalized (and locked-down) version of the dashboard for calls their linked agent has handled.
Utilities Are Now Team-Scoped
Every utility can now be enabled or disabled in two ways:
- At the System level, for system admins to make utilities available to team admins...
- At the Team level, for team admins to enable utilities for their team...
This allows administrators to expose only the relevant utilities to team members - i.e., your billing person handling Card Processing doesn't need access the Inbound Email utility, too.
Enable and disable utilities at the System and Team level
Client Account List
We added an advanced filtering tool for listing accounts by Client Number, Billing Code, Client Name, or DID Source.
The filtering happens after the team's allowed accounts and billing codes are processed, meaning the account list will only let them filter accounts they have access to through their team configuration. Same with the Call Log / Lookup feature.
There are also a variety of filtering options based on Amtelco On/Off client check-mark settings like PCI Compliance, Show Info Pages, Announce ATTA, and many, many more.
Database Health is now...healthier?
The Database Health utility now includes a warning if you don't have purge/archives scheduled in your Intelligent database.
Ensure you are archiving and purging so your database tables don't grow too big.
API Gateway Security
You can now lock down your Mission Control API Gateway using a proxy-aware, IPv6-compatible whitelist.
Optionally, (or in conjunction with the whitelist) you can also force the use of a GET/POST api_key field or Authorization: Bearer api_key header for authentication against the API. Structurally, we combined the Recent Caller API with our other API methods so it benefits from the same security features.
The API gateway has a variety of string manipulation methods (like K-E-B-A-B-C-A-S-E and snake_case) but also things like Base64 encoding/decoding - which Amtelco does not currently have (Amtelco, please cannibalize...)
This feature is now baseline ready for Call Theory to add BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) 3rd-party API integrations, so look forward to those later this summer!
The API whitelist even supports IPv6! How cool is that?
Directory Method Search
We've added a search of the Intelligent Series Contact Methods in your directories. It works against all current Contact Method types available in Amtelco directories, and highlights the match across all Subjects and Views.
A mapping of what field is searched (PhoneNumber, Email, PagerID, etc.) for each method is listed along with the search, allowing you to better target the method you care about.
Better Emails, but needs a better name
Make sure you are handling CAN-SPAM compliance when sending daily logs to your customers. With the Mission Control Better Emails utility, you get:
- Branded, modern, consistent email logs for your customers
- Ability to unsubscribe from your Amtelco Scheduled Send Messages
- Unsubscribe notifications are logged and sent to the call center
- Include your company address information for compliance purposes
- Customize the logo, title, description, and links in the email
- A light and dark theme are included by default
- Build and preview your default settings in real-time
We're also finalizing support for custom email templates so you have options: you can use one of our included themes, design and bring your own, or have us custom create something just for you.
Customize all of your CAN-SPAM and Better Email settings right in the System configuration section
Our Current Playground
We are experimenting with a customer in sending Agent Precision reports to PeoplePraise via a custom-enabled API. This allows direct integration for the Mission Control Board Check utility to upload issues found during review and attach them to your agent's record in People Praise.
You can toggle between submitting records through the PeoplePraise API and exporting CSV files directly from the System settings
We are also integrating all of our WCTP gateway functionality into Mission Control so customers will be able to run their own SMS Aggregator for Amtelco systems again.
The account list feature also includes the option to download individual greetings for your clients, allowing you to provide greetings to them on-demand more easily.
Additional per-client utilities are on the way, too.
Amtelco Security Incident 052024-1
Last week we sent out a customer notification for a security issue that was reported to Amtelco. While we are not going to otherwise publish the details at this time, Amtelco has committed to sharing security guidance on their Field Service website:
"Amtelco is finalizing the notice we will providing to customers that details this concern. This notice, Incident 202405-1, will be placed on the Amtelco customer support website (https://service.amteco.com) later this week."
- Amtelco, last week
As of publishing this post, I could not find the referenced 052024-1 incident documentation (but fully expect it soon.)
