Cisco Unified Mobile Agent (Unified Mobile Agent) enables an agent using any PSTN phone and a broadband VPN connection (for agent desktop communications) to function just like an agent sitting in a formal call center and using a Cisco IP Phone that is monitored and controlled by Unified CM JTAPI.
Unified Mobile Agent for Unified CCE/Unified CCH supports call center agents using phones that are not directly controlled by Unified CCE/Unified CCH. You can physically locate a Mobile Agent:
In addition, a Unified Mobile Agent can be available through different phone numbers at different times; the agent enters the phone number at login time. In other words, the agent can access Unified Mobile Agent using any phone number, as long the agent can dial that number through the Unified Communications Manager dial plan.
With Cisco Unified Mobile Agent, contact centers can:
The sections that follow highlight some of the benefits of Unified Mobile Agent, and describe its features.
Prior to Unified Mobile Agent, Unified CCE/CCH used a JTAPI interface to Unified CM to connect customer calls arriving on a voice gateway to an agent's IP phone. Unified Mobile Agent extends the Unified CCE/Unified CCH architecture by enabling it to connect customer calls to an agent phone that is not controlled by Unified CCE/Unified CCH.
Unified Mobile Agent uses a pair of CTI ports that function as proxies for the Mobile Agent phone and the caller phone. Two CTI ports (local and remote) are required for every logged-in Mobile Agent, and the two CTI ports take the place of the Cisco IP Phone monitored and controlled by Unified CM JTAPI. The local CTI port DN is used by the agent at login and is where callers are routed when this agent is selected. The remote CTI port calls the agent either at login for a nailed (permanent) connection or upon being selected for a call by call connection.
Cisco Unified Contact Center functionality remains intact whether an agent is mobile or local:
Agents, at various times, can be either local agents or a Mobile Agents, depending on how they log in.
Regardless of whether agents log in as local or Mobile Agents, the skill groups that they belongs to do not change. In addition, because agents are chosen by existing selection rules and not according to how they are connected, the same routing applies regardless of how the agents log in. In other words, if you want to use the scripting environment to control routing depending on whether agents are local or mobile, you need to assign the agents to different skill groups and design the script accordingly.
Cisco Unified Mobile Agent allows system administrators to configure agents to use either call by call dialing or a nailed connection, or the administrator can configure agents to choose a connection mode at login time.
Mobile Agents are defined as agents using phones not directly controlled by Unified CC, irrespective of their physical location. (The term local agent refers to an agent who uses a phone that is under control of Unified CC, irrespective of physical location.)
You can configure Mobile Agents using either of two delivery modes:
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The administrator can select the Agent chooses option, which allows an agent to select a call delivery mode at login. |
In a call by call delivery mode, the Mobile Agent's phone is dialed for each incoming call. When the call ends, the Mobile Agent's phone disconnects before is it made ready for the next call.
The call by call call flow works as follows:
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In call by call mode, the Answer Wait Time is 3 to 15 seconds longer than in a local agent inbound call scenario. Specify a Redirect on No Answer setting large enough to accommodate the extra processing time. |
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In call by call delivery mode, callers often perceive a longer ring time compared to nailed connection delivery mode. This is because callers hear the ringtone for the duration of the call flow; ringing stops only after the agent answers. From the Unified CCE reporting perspective, a Mobile Agent in call by call delivery mode has a longer Answer Wait Time for the same reason. |
In nailed connection delivery mode, the agent is called once, at login, and the phone line remains connected through multiple customer calls. See the following figure.
The nailed connection call flow works as follows:
The Connect Tone feature in the nailed connection mode enables the system to play a tone to the Mobile Agent through the agent's headset to let the agent know when a new call is connected. In the nailed connection mode, you can configure an audible connect tone in addition to a call arrival notice (on the desktop only).
Connect Tone is particularly useful when Auto Answer is enabled or the agent is an Outbound agent. Here are its features:
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You can use Agent Greeting for Mobile Agents only with parent/child deployments that are approved by Cisco Assessment-to-Quality (A2Q) with Design Mentoring Services (DMS). |
You can use the Agent Greeting feature to record a message that plays automatically to callers when they connect to you. Your greeting message can welcome the caller, identify you, and include other useful information.
The following limitations apply to the Agent Greeting feature for Mobile Agents.
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In the Agent Greeting Call Type Report, this call does not appear as a failed agent greeting call. |
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In the Agent Greeting Call Type Report, this call does not appear as a failed agent greeting call. |
For more information about Agent Greeting, see Agent Greeting requirements.
With Whisper Announcement, agents can hear a brief prerecorded message just before they connect with each caller. The announcement plays only to the agent; the caller hears ringing (based on existing ringtone patterns) while the announcement plays. The announcement can contain information about the caller that helps the agent to prepare for the call; for example, language preference or customer status.
For the Whisper Announcement feature for Unified Mobile Agents, you require a Media Termination Point (MTP) resource on an incoming SIP device. .
For more information about Whisper Announcement, see Whisper Announcement requirements.
Hardware and software requirements for the Unified Mobile Agent are identical to those of Unified CCE. For more information about limitations and scalability for Unified Mobile Agent, see the Hardware & System Software Specification (Bill of Materials) for Cisco Unified ICM/Contact Center Enterprise & Hosted, Release 9.0(1).
A Unified Mobile Agent can use an analog, digital, or IP phone to handle calls.
To use Agent Greeting for Mobile Agents, you must configure external conference-bridge (hardware) resources. To estimate the number of required resources, you can use the following formula:
Number of conference bridge resources = Mobile Agent call rate × Average greeting time (in seconds)
For information about configuring external conference-bridge resources, see the dspfarm profile 1 for conference configuration section in the sample configuration gateway, listed in Media Termination Points Configuration.
For information about using Agent Greeting from CTI OS Agent Desktop, see the note in Verify Login.
You require two CTI ports (local and remote) for every logged-in Mobile Agent.
Unified Mobile Agent uses Unified CM CTI Port as a proxy for the agent's phone. When this proxy is set up, whenever a Mobile Agent is selected to handle a customer call, the following happens:
Unified Mobile Agent requires that maximum number of calls is set to 2 and busy trigger is set to 1.
For Unified Mobile Agent to work properly, you must configure two CTI ports:
One port is required per Mobile Agent. You must assign these CTI ports to theUnified ICME application. The ports are recognized by Unified ICME when receiving the Unified CM configuration.
The following features are supported:
Fault tolerance for the Unified Mobile Agent follows the behavior of Unified CCE/Unified CCH:
Unified Mobile Agent can experience many of the same failure cases as Unified CC:
There are also some failure cases that are unique to Unified Mobile Agent:
Before you proceed, consider the following Unified Mobile Agent limitations and recommendations:
Unified Mobile Agent provides the following silent monitoring support:
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For more information about Silent Monitoring requirements in a Unified Mobile Agent environment, see CTI OS System Manager's Guide for Cisco Unified ICM/Contact Center Enterprise & Hosted. |
Mobile Agent scalability may be contingent on specific Unified CM versions. For more information, see the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 8.x Solution Reference Network Design (SRND).
The following is a list of unsupported features for Mobile Agent:
This section provides sample Unified Mobile Agent call flows for:
In all Unified Mobile Agent call flows, the JTAPI Gateway maintains the signaling association between the inbound and outbound calls and, if necessary, performs further operations on the call. JTAPI Gateway, however, does not terminate media; it uses CTI to deliver the customer call from the inbound gateway port to the outbound gateway port.
This means that a Mobile Agent must use an agent desktop application to log in, change agent state, log out, and perform call control.
The figures in this section:
The following figure shows an inbound call flow.
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Caller and Agent voice gateways can coreside on one device, except in deployments where Silent Monitoring is required. |
The following describes an inbound call flow:
The following figure shows a consult call flow between a Mobile Agent and a local agent.
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Caller and Agent voice gateways can coreside on one device, except in deployments where Silent Monitoring is required. |
The following describes a local consult call flow:
The following figure shows a remote consult call flow between two Mobile Agents.
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Caller and Agent voice gateways can coreside on one device, except in deployments where Silent Monitoring is required. |
The following describes a remote consult call flow:
The following figure shows a remote conference call flow between two Mobile Agents.
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Caller and Agent voice gateways can coreside on one device, except in deployments where Silent Monitoring is required. |
The following describes a remote conference call flow:
The following figure shows a Outbound Option call flow between a customer and a Mobile Agent.
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Unified Mobile Agent supports Outbound Option calls in nailed connection delivery mode only. |
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Caller and Agent voice gateways can coreside on one device, except in deployments where Silent Monitoring is required. |
The following describes an Outbound Option call flow:
Unified Mobile Agent-specific call data is contained in the following Cisco Unified Intelligence Center reports: Agent Team Historical, Agent Real Time, and Agent Skill Group Historical. These “All Field” reports contain information in multiple fields that show what kind of call the agent is on (nonmobile, call by call, nailed connection) and the Unified Mobile Agent phone number.
Notes about Mobile Agents and reporting: