Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 9.0 Data Sheet

Solutions Benefits

Reduces long-distance toll charges and network bandwidth

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise treats the entire IP network as an intelligent switch, meaning that calls can be handled at the edge of the network, thereby reducing bandwidth usage.

Reduces integration costs

Until now, businesses had to integrate numerous products from different vendors - an expensive task that postponed service introduction. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise provides ACD, private branch exchange (PBX), IVR, and web interaction. In addition, the solution supports best-of-class contact center applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), workforce management, recording and monitoring, and wallboards. By consolidating all contact center functions in a single platform, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise reduces capital expenditures and integration expenses while accelerating time to market for a complete contact center solution.

Promotes IP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) migration

The industry is encouraging businesses to migrate from time-division multiplexing (TDM) to IP and from H.323 to SIP to take advantage of converged voice and data services. Because Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise integrates with both IP and TDM networks, it facilitates this transition. Customers can continue to take advantage of their investments in existing systems while migrating to a SIP architecture.

Centralizes services

For the large enterprise, the value is a centralized contact center operation in which the software and administration are maintained centrally. This centralized operation helps the branch offices avoid purchasing and maintaining the software, installing their own upgrades, and making staffing decisions independent of the rest of the company.

Differentiates service

By retaining "call context" as customers are transferred among agents - even between different locations and to at-home agents - a company can differentiate itself through superior customer service. For example, the information a customer has already supplied to purchase one product or service can be retrieved when the customer initiates another purchase or interaction elsewhere.

Allows control of network resources

The enterprise can control certain network resources, such as assigning agents to skill groups and defining routing based on a number called or caller-entered digits such as account numbers. In addition, all functions can be controlled from a single operating interface, reducing training and support requirements.

Agent Capabilities and Benefits

Agent greeting

A configurable, automated agent greeting can be played to callers, standardizing the caller experience. The greeting helps keep the agent voices fresh because they do not have to repeat the same greeting on every call.

Agent whisper

Customers can play a configurable announcement to an agent right before the caller is connected, providing information about the type of call being delivered (for example, sales or tech support) and other guidance. Agents get information about the caller through their headset, speeding problem handling and improving first-call resolution.

CTI option

The Cisco CTI OS Toolkit Desktop is designed for companies that require specialized, custom desktop capabilities tailored to meet the specific needs of their contact center operations. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise can help you deploy a complete CTI strategy, including comprehensive functions at the agent's workstation. The solution offers a rich set of data for business applications, providing enterprisewide call-event and customer-provided information to the agent's desktop. It sets a new standard for true enterprisewide, network-to-desktop CTI with minimal custom development or systems integration, helping your organization implement CTI quickly and cost-effectively.

CRM integration

Your company can save costs, improve efficiency, and increase revenue by using Cisco Unified CRM Connector to integrate your third-party CRM applications with Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise. This integration allows the agent to use the third-party CRM user interface as the sole interface to manage customer interactions. The solution readily supports popular CRM packages, including Oracle PeopleSoft, Oracle Siebel, SAP, Microsoft CRM, and Salesforce.com. The agent can log in, control agent state, and conduct calls through the CRM user interface. When a new call arrives, a screen pop of CRM information instantly appears on the agent's terminal and the agent can retrieve CRM information by phone number, IVR information, or information the agent enters. Calls can be routed, connected to a conference, or transferred from within the CRM screen. Incoming and outgoing call activity is logged here as well.

Cisco Finesse desktop software

The Cisco Finesse desktop is a next-generation agent and supervisor desktop solution designed to provide easy access to the applications and information required by your customer service organization through a customizable web-based interface. It offers your customer care representatives an intuitive, easy to use desktop design to help improve their performance and satisfaction which in turn enhances their ability to provide quality customer service.

For IT professionals, the Cisco Finesse application offers a thin-client agent desktop that integrates smoothly with the Cisco Collaboration portfolio. It is standards-compliant, and offers low cost of customization of the agent and supervisor desktops.

Cisco Agent Desktop

Cisco Agent Desktop provides ready-to-use agent desktop capabilities that allow agents to perform call-control functions directly from their desktops. Integration of Cisco Agent Desktop with Cisco Unified Presence extends real-time collaboration into the broader enterprise by integrating the contact center desktop applications with Cisco Unified Presence. Through this integration, agents and supervisors can collaborate with relevant colleagues and subject-matter experts outside the contact center. For efficiency and convenience, the contact center defines the view to show only those colleagues who are appropriate for agents to access.

Customers may also use Cisco Agent Desktop to integrate with Salesforce.com and Siebel with minimal software development. For other popular third-party CRM applications, Cisco Agent Desktop facilitates integration using key-stroke macros or dynamic URLs, running the (web-based) CRM user interface in the Cisco Agent Desktop integrated browser.

Cisco Agent Desktop Browser Edition

The Cisco Agent Desktop Browser Edition executes as a thin client from within a commercial web browser, making it easy to deploy and maintain. The application also includes an agent toolbar, contact data, enterprise data, and agent status information, making it an ideal solution in thin-client applications.

Cisco Unified IP Phone Agent

Cisco Unified IP Phone Agent provides basic ACD functions on a Cisco Unified IP Phone - and in many cases it eliminates the need for installation of an agent desktop on the agent's PC.

Self-service and call-treatment capabilities

Cisco offers two options for self-service and call treatment: Cisco Unified IP Interactive Voice Response (Unified IP IVR) and Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP). Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise can also integrate with third-party IVR and self-service systems through its open IVR Service Control interface.

Cisco Unified IP IVR

Cisco Unified IP IVR for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise is designed to simplify business integration, increase flexibility, and provide efficiency gains in network hosting. These features reduce business costs - and they can dramatically improve customer satisfaction. Tightly integrated with Cisco Unified Communications Manager software, Cisco Unified IP IVR offers ease of installation, configuration, and application hosting because it is constructed to exploit the power of IP-based communications.

Cisco Unified IP IVR facilitates self-service applications, such as access to checking account information or user-directed call routing, by processing user commands through touch-tone input or speech-recognition technologies. Customers can use voice commands to retrieve the information they require without ever speaking with an agent, or to quickly navigate to the correct department or agent who can help them.

Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal

Cisco Unified CVP operates with both TDM- and IP-based contact centers to provide a call-management and -treatment solution with a self-service IVR option that can use information available to customers on the corporate web server. With support for automatic-speech-recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities, callers can obtain personalized answers to their questions and conduct business in innovative ways without the costs of interacting with a live agent.

For example, with Cisco Unified CVP, you can pay a bill, order products and track delivery, locate a dealer, schedule a pickup, change name and address information, make travel arrangements, check payment status, receive notification of unusual activity, or request literature or product information.

Management Capabilities and Benefits

Supervisory features

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise allows supervisors to view agent states and call information, send text chat messages to agents, interrupt or intercept calls, record conversations, and silently monitor agent calls from the corporate network or through a remote dial-in connection. These features add value to the supervisor's role in the contact center and help them effectively manage their teams.

With supervisor and agent chat capabilities, supervisors can send text messages to agents participating in a call, allowing supervisors to coach agents unobtrusively on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and helping agents resolve customer situations. Supervisors can interrupt an agent's call to create a three-way conference, and then interact with both the caller and the agent to help resolve a concern. A supervisor can remove the agent from a call using the Intercept feature, allowing the supervisor and caller to complete the call on their own while the agent handles another customer request.

Supervisors can change an agent's state from their desktops. For example, agents may forget to make themselves available to take calls after a break or neglect to log out when away from their workstations for an extended period. With Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, supervisors can easily log out missing agents or make unintentionally idle agents ready to take calls. This function is critical to highly distributed contact center deployments.

Supervisors also can change an agent's skill profile in real time. This capability gives supervisors tactical tools to manage their agent teams and support contact center management objectives.

Administration

Streamlined administration allows managers to perform all contact center administration centrally. The administrative interface in Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise allows agents to be set up to handle voice, web, chat, and email contacts, depending on their assigned skill sets. The interface allows system managers, administrators, and supervisors to develop, modify, or view routing scripts; manage the system configuration; monitor contact center performance; define and request reports; and help ensure system security. This one user interface provides enterprisewide control across the single- or multisite contact center.

Management portal

The Cisco Unified Contact Center Management Portal provides a simple-to-use web-based user interface to streamline the day-to-day provisioning and configuration operations performed by contact center managers, team leads, or administrators - such as moves, adds, or modifications of phones, agents, skill groups, teams, and other common contact center administrative functions. Agents with appropriate permission are also provided a unique interface on the Cisco Unified Contact Center Management Portal on which they can make changes to their profile and work assignment. The unified configuration of the management portal is designed to simplify administration of both the applicable IP-based contact center elements and the Cisco Unified Communications Manager components. The Cisco Unified Contact Center Management Portal is a partitioned system that can support multiple business units with complete autonomy, and it offers hierarchical administration to support multiple business-level users with specific roles and responsibilities. Finally, to help administrators and managers keep track of contact center modifications, it provides audit-trail reports detailing all configuration changes and usage of the management portal.

System Capabilities and Benefits

Open systems

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise software takes full advantage of industry-standard hardware platforms, giving you the benefits of many software functions at a modest hardware cost. The open architecture of the system, which includes an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)-compliant database, as well as Java, COM, and .NET interfaces for CTI applications, can integrate with existing contact center solutions, preserving investments in traditional systems and providing a platform for future applications.

Scalability

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise scales from small, single-site deployments of tens of agents up to large enterprise and hosted, distributed deployments that support thousands. Because the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise architecture is software-based, the system scales easily without causing obsolescence of any components. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise is designed to accommodate changing contact center environments.

Distributed fault tolerance

From the network to the desktop, all Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise components and external application links provide carrier-class, distributed fault tolerance at both the hardware and software levels, with real-time application failover capabilities. Self-diagnostics and self-healing features allow the system to automatically take advantage of redundant components when required; the system is resilient to hardware component failures, communications network failures, and asynchronous software errors.

Network management

Both enterprise and hosted contact centers require applications that provide management information and a single point of performance monitoring and troubleshooting. As you face the challenges of deploying, upgrading, and managing contact centers with integrated software, you may incur setup and ongoing operational and maintenance costs that affect your ability to provide your end users a cost-effective solution. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise software provides a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface for integration into centralized network management systems. It also provides integration into a broader unified communications management infrastructure, Cisco Unified Analysis Manager, which comes bundled with Cisco Unified Communications Manager. The analysis manager helps analyze the condition and health of every component in the solution and assists in call-path analysis, trace setting, and log collection.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise is fully integrated with Cisco Unified Operations Manager, and comes bundled with Cisco Support Tools. Cisco Support Tools helps you specifically address the support and serviceability challenges in enterprise and hosted contact centers. It provides new levels of availability and manageability during deployments and upgrades, as well as during normal contact center operations.

Security

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise supports the latest in security and data integrity features and solutions. When deployed, the application servers are hardened to reduce the attack surface and system vulnerability. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is available on all web-based applications, and Transport Layer Security (TLS) and IP Security (IPsec) support is available for sockets-based communications to secure data in transit across trusted and untrusted networks.

In addition to supporting the latest antivirus applications from the major vendors, Cisco offers, as part of its unified communications solutions, the Cisco Security Agent, a host-based intrusion detection and prevention application that provides added protection. By analyzing behavior rather than relying on signature matching, Cisco Security Agent complements the capabilities of antivirus software to provide a robust solution to protect your network and reduce operational costs. For more information, please visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/csa.

Cisco ASR 1000 Aggregation Services Router support

The Cisco ASR 1000 consolidates the Cisco Unified CVP Voice Browser with other network functions on a single server, reducing hardware and support requirements.

Product Functions

Routing functions

The precision queue routing function of Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise provides the intelligent distribution of contacts as they enter the company's network. When a contact requires redirection, the contact center application applies business logic, sending the contact to the best available enterprise resource. For contacts flowing between sites or among agents, precision queues, or IVRs, the routing optimizes each customer's interaction by retaining collected data, eliminating the need for the customer to restate information.

Cisco Pre-Routing and Post-Routing functions

The Cisco Pre-Routing function makes routing decisions for each call while it is still in the carrier's network, enabling the Cisco platform to effectively segment customers, balance calls across the enterprise, and deliver each contact to the best enterprise resource the first time.

The Cisco Post-Routing function provides the intelligent distribution of contacts already connected to a peripheral in your network, whether it is an ACD, PBX, IVR, or web or email server. When a contact requires redirection, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise applies business logic instructing the peripheral to send the contact to the best available enterprise resource.

Customer profile routing

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise extends the sources of data available for making contact routing decisions and for populating agent desktop applications. For instance, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise can perform a lookup in your customer database during routing to guide its decisions. You can also use information from CRM applications to match customers with agents and expand the data available to screen pop applications.

Wherever an agent is based, the system delivers context-call event and customer-profile data - as a contact arrives - allowing the agent or application to personalize service and help maximize efficiency.

Reporting

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise provides real-time and historical data necessary for mission-critical contact center reporting across all media types. The solution provides accurate and timely reports on contact center activity, helping managers make informed decisions regarding staffing levels and contact handling procedures. Standard reporting is provided by the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, which offers numerous report templates intended to meet common reporting needs. With the availability of the underlying data model and schema, you can easily develop custom reports to extend the solution to meet specific reporting needs. Furthermore, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise allows for the export of reporting data to external data warehouse environments for even more advanced analytics.

Universal queue

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise coordinates an agent's ability to work on multiple tasks from various channels while allowing the agent to be interrupted with high-priority tasks as required. For instance, an agent who is assisting a customer using text chat could handle another chat request at the same time, increasing the agent's productivity. Agents also can be delivered a task of a different channel type from their active task. For example, an agent responding to a customer's email message can be sent a voice call, allowing the agent to handle the real-time voice call and then return to the email message. In this way, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise can optimize your agents' activities, helping ensure the highest level of customer service with the resources available.

Remote-agent support

Remote-agent support extends the Cisco Unified Contact Center environment by providing CTI, contact distribution, and reporting capabilities to remote agents in branch offices or at home, through either a broadband network connection or their home telephone line. Cisco Unified Contact Center provides identical user interfaces and feature functions to agents regardless of location.

The Cisco Unified Mobile Agent feature adds the capability to enable agents to choose their destination phone number during login time - and change the number as often as they want - giving the contact center the flexibility to adapt to a fast-moving mobile workforce. With the growth of work-at-home programs, agents can be given location flexibility while reducing startup costs on the part of the contact center. An additional benefit of this capability is allowing agents to be on any phone device on any third-party switch infrastructure.

By incorporating agents outside the physical location of a contact center, Cisco Unified Contact Center helps companies better use existing and on-demand resources and fully extend CTI functions across the extended enterprise.

Social media customer care

Cisco SocialMiner^™software provides a social media customer care solution for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise that enables your company to proactively respond to customers and prospects communicating through public social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook or other compatible public forum or blogging sites. By providing social media monitoring, queuing, and workflow to organize customer posts on social media networks and deliver them to your social media customer care team, your company can respond to customers in real time through the same social network they are using to communicate.

This innovative capability is enabled by Cisco SocialMiner software, which searches multiple social networks to capture public customer postings - and then organizes, filters, and prioritizes these postings and presents them to your customer care team for response. Your customer service representatives could respond to a customer service problem or reach out to new customers looking for information about your products or services.

Cisco SocialMiner software combined with Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise can help your company enhance customer service, improve customer loyalty, add new customers, and protect your brand.

Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager

Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager can help your contact center agents respond immediately to customer questions, using your website along with text chat or real-time web collaboration. Web collaboration allows contact center agents to chat live with customers through the web and, in a blended collaboration session, the agent and customer can talk live on the phone and review web content simultaneously to address questions quickly and effectively. In addition, with the Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager web callback feature, customers can request a callback from a contact center when the right agent is available, rather than waiting in a voice or chat queue. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise routes customer requests from your website using the same routing logic used for voice calls. Because it facilitates effective, personalized customer assistance, Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager is suitable for both sales- and service-oriented contact centers.

Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager

Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager is a comprehensive solution for managing large volumes of customer email inquiries submitted to your company mailboxes or website. Based on customizable business rules, Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager accelerates the response process by automatically directing messages to the right agent or support team, categorizing and prioritizing messages, suggesting relevant response templates, and, if desired, sending automated replies. Quick, accurate turnaround of inquiries helps build stronger customer relationships, added value, and greater efficiency in the contact center.

Cisco Outbound Option

The Cisco Outbound Option, with its combination of outbound dialing modes, complements the powerful inbound call-handling capability of the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise platform. You can build campaigns to use predictive, progressive, or preview dialing, which is integrated with inbound calls and compliant with contact center service levels to offer a powerful blended solution. You can allocate agents to handle only inbound, only outbound, or both inbound and outbound contacts, offering an effective way to increase resource use in a contact center.

Product Name

Part Number

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Solution

IPCE-BUNDLE

Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise Solution

CCE-PAC-BUNDLE