There are number of ways that an IVR can - today - obtain information an leverage it to drive logical branching, play as prompts or TTS to the caller, or use to determine ACD routing parameters. 

• The most obvious approach is to leverage connectors on the bridge server platform and access them within a flow using the Call Bridge Action action. (side note, yes I intended to use "action" twice. Both Bridge and Architect have functionality called Actions and sometimes they invoke each-other making for a humorous linguistic moment). With this action you can take advantage of any of the integration support provided by bridge while still keeping the implementation in the IVR generally simple to perform; more along the lines of a configuration. I anticipate that this will be the most common form of data access reaching out to CRMs, Web Services, APIs, DB, <fill in the blank really>.
• Ask a caller to enter or provide data.
• Contact List Data - If you are running an outbound campaign, Architect will read in the contact list data by default and make the information available for use in call routing or presenting an agent-less outbound experience. Within a call flow look to use the Call.Contact.<column> value. 
• More of a nuance, but with Secure flows (at the time of writing it is still a forthcoming feature) you can pass data in from either the call flow that invokes the secure flow experience or the agent script that invokes the experience.
• Architect has the ability to obtain data from the participant, which opens up possibilities for platform extensions and applications to potentially affect the participant and then allow the IVR to access data in that manner. 

One of my above is obviously a feature in development but should be available soon so I wanted to mention it. Beyond that there are a number of other ways that we could explore in the future - I'm interested to hear what the community has to say.

To jump start any ideas: here are some things the team has talked about (note: not in progress at this time):

• Leveraging platform data from within the flow: Relate contact details, related interactions, queue performance data, schedule details, and agent availability.
• In-app lightweight data store. For PureClouders that are former CIC world, there seems to be interest in what IP tables offered to Handlers.

Curious to know your thoughts!

Hi Nicholas,

It’s been a while you posted this answer, so I was wondering if you know any news about Secure Flows that you mentioned.

I noticed that is presented on Resource Center as a “Feature coming soon”. (https://help.mypurecloud.com/articles/secure-call-flows/) but I don't know any more information about this.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Ana Laia

Nicholas has moved on to another company, but perhaps @Katie Ritz? can help...

Thank you George, I'll be waiting for the answer.

Hi Ana --

I can provide some additional details. The Secure Flow feature is going through our final QA process before being released as Generally Available. As previously mentioned it does allow for data to be passed into a secure flow which can then be used during the secure flow process. Common use case might be a transaction ID which can be used during the secure flow to do a data dip and retrieve additional information that can be used during the secure flow. There are a couple of options on implementing a secure flow. It can be configured in an agentless manner, an example might be a caller wanting to check their account balance and entering account information via a secure flow or alternatively it can be used with an agent assisted flow such ordering product and collecting credit card information for payment of services via a secure flow.

The idea behind the secure flow is that any data specified as secure is not logged or recorded while a caller is in the secure flow. Additionally in a agent assisted setup the agent is placed on hold while the caller is in the secure flow so any sensitive information is also protected from the agent hearing. This allows for sensitive data such as account numbers, Social Security numbers and credit card numbers to be used securely.

We hope to have this feature released soon once the QA process is completed. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Thanks,

Katie Ritz

Hi Katie,

Thank you for your answer.

Besides using this kind of flow to collect sensitive information of customers, our idea is to use it to collect customer’s consent to record their personal data.

For instance, at the time of collecting a customer’s personal data, the agent transfers the customer to a secure flow. In this flow, the customer is asked if he/she consents that his/her personal data will be recorded, then he /she presses an option, this option is recorded (via data dip) and in the end it’s returned to the same agent. Do you think this would be possible using secure flows?

In addition, can you tell us if there is an expected date for its release?

Best regards,

Ana Laia

Yes, absolutely secure flow could be used for that purpose. You would setup scriptor to have a button (or other action to invoke the secure flow) which would send the caller to the secure flow. There is a configuration option within scriptor that indicates that the caller will return to the agent and keeps the agent connected to the call. Additionally when configuring the secure flow in architect that is a 'Return to Agent' action which would be used when the end caller should return to the agent.

Expected release date is mid-August but it does depend on completion of our QA process so it is possible that date will change. We will provide release notes once we release the feature so you can watch for those in the coming weeks at the following link: https://help.mypurecloud.com/release-notes/

Thanks,

Katie Ritz

Thank you for your answers Katie.

Can you help us to understand how agents will proceed to transfer calls to the secure flow?

Is it only available on Script? If so, how is the script presented to agents on inbound calls? We are asking this, because our idea is for agents to make this transfer during inbound calls.

We are also planning to use our customized front-end, thus could it be possible to configure a button do perform this action (invoke the secure flow)?

Best regards,

Ana Laia

Ana--

Yes, a script is what you would use to have an agent transfer a connected caller to a secure flow. In the PureCloud client the script is associated with an Queue and is presented to the agent in the agent view once they receive the inbound call alerting. A common use case we hear is a button presented in the script that once pressed by the agent will send the caller to the secure flow. The button would be configured in the script to use the Invoice Secure Flow Action to send the caller to the appropriate secure flow. You can find out more about script setup/configuration at this resource center link https://help.mypurecloud.com/articles/about-scripting/ and more about the Invoice Secure Flow Action at this link https://help.mypurecloud.com/articles/available-script-actions/

I am not familiar with the customized front-end you are using, perhaps we can touch base on that separately so I can learn more about how that works and we can determine how that might work with the secure flow feature.

Thanks,

Katie Ritz