Use Case - Creating a Dynamic IVR with TTS

Play only relevant IVR options to a customer with a simple Power Automate integration and using the TTS announcement activity in the Nimbus workflow.

In this Use Case we tackle the following scenario:

  • Your call center offers lots of options in an IVR. For your customer it takes a long time to listen to all options while only few of them are relevant.
  • Instead of playing the whole list of options in an IVR we want to play only relevant options to our customers. We can do this with a simple Power Automate integration and using the TTS announcement activity in the Nimbus workflow.
  • For the calling customer this is convenient because they get relevant options and save time. The announcement text can be shorter than the default text with all options, thus the customer spends less time listening to it.

PRECONDITIONS

 

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Prepare in Nimbus

VARIANT A

First, create a Parameter in Nimbus called "DynamicIVR". This parameter's default should hold the full IVR text such as:

Press 1 for Option 1

Press 2 for Option 2

Press 3 for Option 3

Press 4 for Option 4

☝ Keep in mind, that Nimbus has a character limit on the TTS "Announcement" Workflow Activities . If the text exceeds the limit, it will not be played.

VARIANT B

 If you have longer announcements, then you need to create more than one Parameters i.e. "DynamicIVRPart1", "DynamicIVRPart2", "DynamicIVRPart3", etc.

NAME DEFAULT VALUE
DynamicIVRPart1 Press 1 for Option 1 Press 2 for Option 2 Press 3 for Option 3 Press 4 for Option 4 Press 5 for Option 5   
 
DynamicIVRPart2   
 
Press 6 for Option 6 Press 7 for Option 7 Press 8 for Option 8 Press 9 for Option 9
DynamicIVRPart3 Press 10 for Option 10 Press 11 for Option 11 ...etc.

✅ The following steps describe variant A.

Create the workflow

VARIANT A

Step
Details

Add an Announcement activity and enable "Add Parameters".

  • Add the announcement by inserting just the DynamicIVR parameter.
  • If you have more than one parameter, add additional announcement activities.

Then add the "Input Customer" activity.

  • You need to add all options in the "Expected" input
  • Leave the "Prompt Text" blank as we already covered that with the previous announcement.

✅ Finish your workflow according to your needs, then don't forget to assign it to your Modality Service Settings. You are now ready to implement the Power Automate Flow.

Create the Power Automate Flow

This is a stub, because the logic how you create the dynamic text is up to you. 

Step Details

Begin the flow:

  • with GetOnNewTasks when your service is called directly   
    OR
  • with GetOnUpdatedTasks if the call has been routed by another service into this service.

The next step should be done based on where you store your calling user details.

  • Add a lookup logic based on the calling customer, e.g. identified using the MicrosoftCallerId.
  • Follow up with a branching in your flow depending on your user identification criteria.

This step depends greatly on your CRM or user directory to look up your customers.

  • You can also define other customer-defining factors, e.g. country of origin, age, previous call contents. Everything however relies on what you store in your own CRM system, database or list. Nimbus only stores system System Fields and Parameters.
  • As an inspiration, you can have a peek into our "Lookup" Use Case on how to get data from various sources: 

Based on how you identify and announce to your user you can now overwrite the default contents of your announcement Parameters

  • In your flow, create a branch per "Customer" or "Type of Customer" (see previous step on how you identified or distinguish you customer base).
  • Save your new customer-specific Announcement text into a Compose element.
  • Repeat as needed for other customers in your flow branches.

When running variant B (e.g. longer or multiple announcements) don't forget to update all your Parameters individually (Update all values: DynamicIVRPart1, DynamicIVRPart2, DynamicIVRPart3)

 

Follow up each "Compose" element in your in your flow with an UpdateTask Nimbus connector step.

  • Set the CustomContextParameters. DynamicIVR to the Compose outputs.
  • If you have multiple types of customers announcements, use "UpdateTask" for each branch respectively.