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In the Prepare phase, you evaluate Cisco technologies that address your business needs. Gather information about your business and technical environment that will feed into the high-level design. Create a business case for the contact center solution that provides the best return on your investment.
Understand the features and functions of contact center applications. Start with the high-level information in the Cisco Collaboration Systems Features and Benefits Overview and the Contact Center Overview, then proceed to the more detailed and release-specific information in the System Release Notes for Contact Center: Cisco Collaboration Systems Release 10.6(1).
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For details about this Cisco Collaboration Systems, see System Release Documentation.
Contact center components are an integral part of Cisco Collaboration Systems family of products. The contact center functionality delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multi-channel contact management over an IP infrastructure to call center agents anywhere in the enterprise.
The Cisco IP network infrastructure also permits rapid deployment of emerging applications such as desktop IP telephones, unified messaging, video, desktop collaboration, and enterprise application integration with IP phone displays.
By combining multi-channel automatic call distributor (ACD) functionality with IP telephony in a unified solution, contact center products help to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure. Contact center software profiles each customer using contact-related data such as dialed number and caller-entered digits (CED) and, simultaneously, monitors the resources at contact center to meet customer needs, including agent skills and availability, queue lengths, expected delay and so on. This combination of customer and contact center data is processed through user-defined routing scripts that graphically reflect a company's business rules, thus enabling contact center software to route each contact to the optimum resource anywhere in the enterprise.
Contact center software enables companies to deploy a complete network-to-desktop CTI strategy, including comprehensive capability at the agent's workstation. A contact center system delivers a uniquely rich set of data to business applications, providing enterprise-wide call-event and customer-profile information to a targeted agent's desktop.
As part of the Cisco Collaboration system, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise solutions enable organizations to create unique customer-centric experiences. By combining network elements with collaboration and customer contact applications, contact centers can readily handle large volumes of customer interactions, whether voice phone calls, video, email, or Web-based communications, to provide superior customer service.
The comprehensive portfolio of Cisco customer contact solutions, including Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise (Unified ICME) and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE) offers more efficient, effective, and accurate service, resulting in increased customer satisfaction. Contacts are routed to the most appropriate agent, based on business rules and objectives. Advanced computer telephony integration capabilities provide call event and customer profile information to an agent's desktop. With the flexibility afforded by products such as the Cisco Jabber and Cisco TelePresence products, agents can work from home or while traveling.
Cisco Collaboration endpoints range from IP phones to web, mobile, and desktop clients, and deliver voice and video across devices and intelligently connect to the cloud.
TelePresence Video Communication Server Expressway (Cisco VCS) works transparently with Unified CM to provide rich TelePresence services, and also supports on-premises and cloud applications, as well as interoperability with third-party unified communications, IP telephony networks, and VoIP systems. The Cisco TelePresence EX Series is an all-in-one tool that streamlines the desktop so you can fluidly move from individual work on your laptop, to a quick video call with a colleague, to problem-solving over shared spreadsheets.
With voice self-service solutions, including Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP), and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (Unified CCX), many calls do not require agent assistance. The open architecture of Unified CVP allows callers to access content also used in web-based interactions, resulting in a consistent customer experience, regardless of the self-service media channel.
Cisco Unified Intelligence Center (Unified Intelligence Center) offers both a web-based Reporting application and an Administration interface. The Reporting application is designed for use with report templates that are populated by the report databases of Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Unified Customer Voice Portal. The Administration interface supports the Operations, Administration, Maintenance, and Provisioning (OAMP) of the Reporting application.
Cisco MediaSense is a media recording platform that can be used by compliance recording companies whose regulatory environment requires all conversations to be recorded and maintained.
The following Cisco hardware and software components make up a complete contact center deployment:
Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM), and Cisco Unified Communications Manager IM and Presence Service for call control management
Contact center components such as Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE), and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (Unified CCX)
Cisco Unified Intelligence Center for web-based reporting and administration
Cisco MediaSense for media recording capabilities
Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP) for queuing and self-service
Conferencing component such as Cisco TelePresence MCU
Enterprise Edge components such as Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server, and Cisco Expressway Series.
Cisco Unified Border Element for session border controller (SBC), providing voice and video connectivity from the enterprise IP network to Service Provider SIP trunks
Devices (Endpoints), such as Cisco Desktop Collaboration Experience DX650, Cisco TelePresence System EX Series, Cisco Unified IP Phone 8961, Cisco Jabber for Windows (Jabber for Windows), Cisco Virtualization Experience Media Engine (VXME) for Windows, and Cisco Jabber Guest.
Communications gateway components such as Cisco Integrated Services Routers (ISR).
For more information on contact center features, go to System Features in This Release.
The Cisco Collaboration System supports the deployment models in the following table.
Deployment Models |
Description |
Single-Site Model | This model is designed for autonomous offices in which most or all employees are IPC users. This model can support up to 30,000 users. |
Multisite Centralized Call Processing Model | This model is designed for distributed operations with a large central or headquarters site and multiple remote or branch sites. This model can support up to a total of 30,000 phones distributed among up to a maximum of 1000 sites. Based upon the bandwidth available, each site can support any number of users up to the overall total of 30,000 phones. |
Multisite Distributed Call Processing Model | This model is designed for organizations with large user populations or large numbers of geographically distributed sites resulting in the need for more than a single call processing entity. This model is suited for deployments that require multiple Cisco Unified Communications Manager clusters or Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express platforms. Each call processing entity in this model is configured as a single-site model or multisite centralized call processing model and each has a common dial plan and feature set. |
Clustering Over IP WAN Call Processing Model | This model is designed for organizations with large user populations across multiple sites that are connected by an IP WAN with the QoS features enabled. It supports the Local Failover Deployment Model and the Remote Failover Deployment Model. |
The Cisco Collaboration contact center system is a portion of the end-to-end system release for enterprise, which integrates telephony, conferencing, messaging, and contact center products for enterprise IP customers in a variety of deployment models using SIP and SCCP terminating devices over IP networks. Cisco Collaboration is centered on the latest Unified Communications Manager release.
For detailed contact center feature information, see System Release Notes for Contact Center: Cisco Collaboration Systems Release 10.5(1). For configuration options, see Release Notes for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Release 10.5(1) and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Release Notes 10.5(1).
The contact center includes these software components:
Cisco Unified Communications Manager—Provides scalable, distributable, and highly available enterprise IP telephony call-processing capabilities.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE)—Creates an IP-based contact management solution that provides intelligent call routing, network-to-desktop CTI, and multimedia contact management.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (Unified CCX)—Provides a multimedia (voice, data, and web), IP-enabled customer-care application environment that enhances the efficiency of contact centers. It provides an Integrated Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Unified IP IVR, and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) virtual contact center solution with support for up to 300 agents and 300 Unified ports.
Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (Cisco TelePresence VCS)—The Cisco TelePresence VCS extends face-to-face video collaboration across organizations, and to remote workers and mobile users, by supporting any-to-any video and telepresence communications.
Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server Expressway—Cisco VCS Expressway works transparently with Unified CM to provide rich telepresence services to organizations. Cisco VCS supports on-premises and cloud applications, offers interoperability with third-party unified communications, IP telephony networks, and VoIP systems.
Cisco TelePresence MCU—Designed for the mission-critical communication needs of large enterprises
Cisco Agent Desktop (CAD)—Provides productivity tools for agents and supervisors. Allows supervisors to view agent states and call information and to send text messages to agents, record conversations, and provide advanced monitoring functions.
Computer Telephony Integration Object Server (CTI OS)—Combines a powerful, feature-rich server and an object-oriented software development toolkit to enable rapid development and deployment of complex CTI applications.
The contact center offers two products that provide self-service call treatment capability:
Cisco Unified IP IVR—Automates access to account information or user-directed call routing by processing user commands through touch-tone input or speech-recognition technologies. Unified IP IVR helps customers who are calling the contact center use voice commands to retrieve the information that they require without ever speaking with an agent, or to quickly navigate to a customer service agent who can help them the first time.
Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP)—Integrates time-division multiplexing (TDM) with IP-based contact centers to provide audio and video call management and call treatment functions. Unified CVP includes a self-service IVR option that can use information that is available to customers on the corporate web server. With support for automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) and self-service capabilities, callers can obtain personalized answers to complex questions and conduct business without the cost of interacting with a live agent.
Steps to Success is a Cisco methodology that outlines the tasks required to complete a successful customer engagement. Registered users can visit the Steps to Success resource site for Cisco Collaboration process flows.
Cisco Collaboration Systems Services is a Cisco service offering that provides engineering expertise and best practices.
Registered users can visit the Cisco Unified Communications Services partner site.
Nonregistered users can visit the Services for Unified Communications site.