CCXML is among the most popular standards for managing voice controls. Its purpose is to inform a browser on how to handle telephony controls. Knowledge of CCXML will help you build custom applications for enterprise telephony, using your existing solutions like Avaya, Blueworx, SAP, as well as dedicated developer tools. For example, if you want to build an online IVR app using Java, CCXML is among the key technologies you’ll need for call control.
CCXML Origin Story
CCXML was developed by the Worldwide Web Consortium or W3C (of which, incidentally, Tim Burners Lee is the director), the body responsible for formulating standards for global telephony. It was envisioned as an upgrade to VoiceXML which is meant for voice UI management.
While Call Control eXtensible Markup Language, or CCXML for short, was launched in the early 2000s, it is still in a mature proposal stage, with new iterations released regularly.
If you are a customer experience application developer, CCXML helps to address your following challenges:
- Gives every real-world phone connection its dedicated VoiceXML interpreter, thereby increasing its scope of applications
- Supports multi-party conferencing, advanced audio control, and the ability to establish relationships between participants
- Enables multiple advanced call functions, such as the ability to make outgoing calls
- Paves the way for inter-device communication, thanks to the ability to receive events and messages from an external entity
- Provides support for a wide range of asynchronous events, including status events and message parsing
How Does CCXML Influence Customer Experience?
CCXML has a massive role to play in the telephony UX and contact centre CX. it facilitates powerful applications that can perform a wide range of functions, including multi-participant conversation support, call-backs through the outgoing call facility, bridging multiple call legs and placing outgoing calls even as you work on the ongoing interaction. Essentially, it creates a unified application interface, which can be programmed to enable several tasks without any application fragmentation or “messy” code.
Your agents gain from reliable and intuitive functioning of the contact centre’s most foundational features, while customers can be sure to have their expectations from telephony met. Enterprises can also leverage CCXML within their proprietary solution suites to further integrate functionalities and features.
How Does CCXML Work?
Using CCXML, you’re essentially using an application that’s a group of CCXML documents; a single application instance is called a Session, that spans multiple calls and documents. CCXML works to manage the interaction between media streams, connections, conference objects, etc., to enable sophisticated call controls. It can also receive asynchronous events and trigger a response.
To use CCXML in a real-world scenario, you would have to either use a mainstream programming language like Java along with open source CCXML engines like Oktopus or work with a telephony solutions provider that offers CCXML technologies. For example, Avaya has a solution called Dialogue Designer meant for building and testing CCXML and VoiceXML applications. It would even equip you with application templates, graphic design tools, and embedded browsers for testing and debugging, making it easier to get started with CCXML.
