Contact centers of multisourcing enterprises leverage a combination of sourcing solutions, including captive, outsourced, and offshore. The typical multisource contact-center environment is organizationally complex, consisting of sites located all over the world, and staffed by direct company employees and/or outsourced agents.

In this environment, most locations operate independently and use disparate contact center technologies, including routing, administrative solutions, and reporting tools. This combination of tools and technologies makes both management and quality monitoring across different locations extremely challenging.

Cisco’s Webex Contact Center offers a unique solution that combines contact center and IP technologies in a global call management service. The Webex Contact Center solution is built on the Cisco Midpoint Call Management ® technology, a centralized control point for managing and monitoring calls and contacts across a heterogeneous contact center environment.

Offered as a cloud service, Webex Contact Center provides enterprises with full control over their global contact center queues and creates the appearance of a single, unified contact center environment. Calls, chats, and emails are distributed to the contact center sites where agents are available. When agents are occupied, contacts are queued centrally so they can be serviced by the next available agent irrespective of the physical location of the agent.

In the voice context, by queuing calls centrally, enterprises can offload the queuing function from their premises-based equipment, thus achieving substantial cost savings in telecom hardware, toll charges, and bandwidth use. More importantly, a call can be directed to the next available agent at any site. And because the endpoint of the call can be anywhere around the globe, Webex Contact Center seamlessly integrates remote agents and at-home agents into the enterprise’s multisource contact center environment.

A Webex Contact Center tenant is an enterprise that has contact centers at one or more sites. The enterprise also has entry points for incoming contacts that are associated with queues. Incoming contacts can be toll-free numbers for voice calls, designated email addresses for emails, or chats with agents. For example, an enterprise that is named Acme might have an entry point that is named Welcome. Welcome classifies contacts into AcmeBilling and distributes to teams of agents in Chicago, Manila, and Bangalore.

Each Webex Contact Center tenant profile consists of sites, teams, entry points, and queues.

• A site is a physical contact center location under the control of the enterprise or an outsourcer. For example, Acme might have sites in Chicago, Manila, and Bangalore.

• A team is a group of agents at a specific site who handle a particular type of contact. For example, Acme might have teams at their Chicago site that are named Chi_Billing, Chi_Sales, and Chi_GoldCustomerService, and teams at their Bangalore site named Bgl_Billing, Bgl_GoldCustomerService, and Bgl_Experts. Agents can be assigned to more than one team, but an agent can service only one team at a time.

• An entry point is the initial landing place for the customer contacts on the Webex Contact Center system. For the voice contacts, typically one or more toll-free or dial numbers are associated with an entry point. IVR call treatment is performed while a call is in the entry point.

• A queue is where active contacts are kept while they await handling by an agent. Contacts are moved from the entry point into a queue and are distributed to agents.

Tenants that use the outdial feature are also configured with at least one outdial entry point and one outdial queue.

Telecom managers, contact center managers, and other representatives of the enterprise who are authorized to access the Webex Contact Center service have a view of contact center activity at their enterprise through the Webex Contact Center Management Portal.

In addition to sites, teams, entry points, and queues, the Provisioning module of the Webex Contact Center Management Portal provides an interface to add agents and assign them to teams. Each agent is configured with an agent profile, a value that determines the agent’s permission levels and Agent Desktop behaviors, including which wrap-up and idle codes are available to the agent. Thus, you should add wrap-up and idle codes before you define agent profiles, and define agent profiles before you define agents. If your enterprise is provisioned with the optional skills-based routing feature, you should also add skills and skill profiles before you define teams and agents.

You can access the Webex Contact Center Management Portal through a web browser. The Portal provides access to Webex Contact Center modules that enable authorized users to perform various tasks such as:

• View real-time and historical contact center data

• Silently monitor interactions directed to destination sites

• Create agent accounts and other contact center resources

• Create and edit scheduled contact routing strategies and team capacity strategies to control contact treatment and distribution

In addition, the Webex Contact Center Management Portal landing page displays graphs of real-time and historical call activity and current agent status.

Your assigned user profile determines your access to Webex Contact Center modules and functionality.

For information about how to access and work with the Webex Contact Center Management Portal, see Supported Browsers for Management Portal.

After you sign in to the Management Portal, click the module on the navigation bar that you want to access. If the navigation bar is collapsed, click the navigation button on the top-left corner of the Management Portal landing page to expand it. If you can't see a module in your interface, then either you don’t have the appropriate permissions to access the module, or it’s an optional module that your enterprise doesn’t have license to.

The following table describes the modules that authorized users can access through the Webex Contact Center Management Portal.

All dates and times displayed on the Webex Contact Center Management Portal and in the Webex Contact Center modules reflect the time zone that is provisioned for the enterprise with the following exceptions:

• Dates and times displayed on the main pages of the Real-Time Reports and Call Monitoring modules reflect the browser time.

• Time values in routing strategies are based on the time zone that is provisioned for the entry point or queue. If no time zone is specified, the time zone is provisioned for the enterprise.

Dates are converted to UTC time when they are saved to the database, so the system behavior, such as time-of-day routing, is applied universally across the multi-site contact center network, regardless of which time zones the sites are located in. The system filters the historical reports based on the enterprise time zone.

To specify a different time zone for displaying the time values in routing strategies, see View routing strategies by time zone.

Note	When you edit a tenant time zone, you must relogin to see the changes.