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Cisco® Unified Contact Center Express - an integral component of the Cisco Unified Communications system - offers an integrated, full-featured solution for managing customer contacts with all the benefits of the converged Cisco Unified IP Telephony architecture.
Cisco Unified Communications Solutions unify voice, video, data, and mobile applications on fixed and mobile networks, delivering a media-rich collaboration experience across business, government agency, and institutional workspaces. These applications use the network as the platform to enhance comparative advantage by accelerating decision time and reducing transaction time. The security, resilience, and scalability of the network enable users in any workspace to easily collaborate every time, everywhere, so everyone's included. Cisco Unified Communications is part of a comprehensive solution that includes network infrastructure, security, wireless, management applications, lifecycle services, flexible deployment and outsourced management options, and third-party applications.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express helps customers move into the next phase of customer contact - beyond today's contact center to a Customer Interaction Network, a distributed, IP-based customer-service infrastructure that comprises a continuously evolving suite of innovative, multichannel services and customer-relationship-management (CRM) applications. These services and applications provide premium responsiveness and streamlined customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer-service capabilities across the entire organization, giving your business a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction and leading to better customer experiences.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Overview
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express meets the needs of midmarket and enterprise branch or departmental companies that need easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use, secure, virtual, highly available, and sophisticated customer-interaction management for up to 300 agents. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express support for powerful agent-based assisted service as well as fully integrated self-service applications results in reduced business costs and improved customer response by providing sophisticated and distributed automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), and agent and desktop services in a single-server, contact-center-in-a-box deployment while offering the flexibility to scale to larger, more demanding environments. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express helps ensure your business rules for inbound and outbound voice, e-mail, Web, and chat; and customer interaction management helps ensure that each contact is delivered to the right agent the first time.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is provided in three versions: Standard, Enhanced, and Premium, to better match product functions with your customer contact interaction management requirements. All Cisco Unified Contact Center Express products are tightly integrated with Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
Routing Capabilities and Benefits
Maximum return on investment for contact centers is provided when your company's business rules can influence the behavior of the contact center. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express routing capabilities facilitate categorization and prioritization of customer contacts in a way that best meets your business requirements to ensure that each contact is routed to the right agent at the right location the first time. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express routing supports a wide range of routing logic that can accurately target and selectively route different classes of contacts - or even single out individual contacts for customized, prioritized routing treatment.
Call-routing behaviors based on conditional events such as time of day, day of week, or holiday routing as well as the ability to specify service levels and move contacts between agent groups and reprioritize contacts in queue based on your business rules are available. The Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Premium product integration with your enterprise's customer database can help ensure that the optimal routing decisions are made; the application can give agents extensive information on a per-contact basis through a CRM or other application screen pop.
Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager
Customers are turning to company Websites to locate information about products and services, to seek support, and to conduct transactions. In addition, customers are seeking alternative ways, such as e-mail, to contact customer support centers, and the volume of incoming e-mail interactions to contact centers is growing. Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager, integrated with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express, increases agent productivity through a powerful yet intuitive user interface. A full suite of tools, including suggested responses, a knowledge base, and customer history, are easily accessible, enabling quick, consistent responses to e-mail messages that come into the contact center.
Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager
The Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager gives your organization tools to increase sales, facilitate new revenue-generation opportunities, and enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. Integrated with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express, its powerful Web chat and collaboration features allow your contact center agents to deliver immediate answers to customer questions supported by comprehensive information stored in a shared knowledge base or Webpages and other Web-based content. This added channel in the contact center adds to agent productivity - and ultimately to increased customer satisfaction.
Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization
Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization integrated with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express helps supervisors and other managers align contact center performance with business objectives by integrating workforce optimization within the team's daily workflow - combining agent and supervisor desktop tools in a composite application with workforce optimization software to unify the entire customer interaction process.
Directly integrated with Cisco Supervisor Desktop, Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization unifies the tactical tools that supervisors need to optimize team performance: Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization Workforce Manager and Quality Manager software. The Workforce Management component allows contact center managers to develop schedules for multiple sites, manage critical performance indicators, and manage real-time adherence to schedules. At the same time, the Quality Manager piece provides a voice compliance and evaluation solution, with optional advanced quality-management features such as screen recording, for agent performance optimization and dispute resolution.
Cisco Outbound Option
The Cisco Outbound Option complements the powerful inbound call-handling capability of the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express platform by offering blended preview outbound dialing capabilities. You can build campaigns to use preview dialing, which is integrated with inbound calls to provide a blended inbound/outbound solution. These blended functions let agents serve both inbound calls and outbound campaign tasks when the inbound queue is empty, allowing for the most efficient use of agent resources for both inbound calls and outbound campaigns.
Computer Telephony Integration
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express can integrate with any CRM or other application that can run on the agent's Microsoft Windows desktop. Integration is achieved using a powerful real-time programmable CTI workflow engine that invokes keystroke macro emulation to automate the transfer of caller-entered information, or through an external application action. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express provides powerful integration tools through support for custom Java classes and methods that can be invoked under real-time workflow control. These features facilitate integration of Cisco Agent Desktop with other Windows-based applications such as Siebel with minimal software development.
In addition, Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Premium allows you to apply HTTP integration to provide integration and a screen pop with browser-based applications such as Salesforce.com running in the Cisco Agent Desktop embedded browser.
IVR and Self-Service Capabilities and Benefits
Unlike many competitive products, Cisco Unified Contact Center Express does not require purchase of additional IVR services, but rather provides an integrated ready-to-use IVR solution. Every package provides an IVR queue point, custom call treatment, arbitrarily deep voice menus, custom voice prompts, and the ability to process customer phone keypad presses through dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) processing to make routing decisions or to present a screen pop to the agent.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Premium adds the ability to have true, sophisticated, fully automated self-service applications integrated with your agent-assisted contact interaction management. This critical feature helps enable significant cost reduction on a per-contact basis and provides significant flexibility in handling customer contacts.
Two full self-service IVR ports are packaged at no additional charge with each Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Premium seat. In addition, support is provided for adding advanced self-service technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text to Speech (TTS), and Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML), as well as providing support for real-time notification services through e-mail, fax, or paging and the ability to invoke custom workflow processing (for example, Web-based callback) through HTTP requests).
Cisco Unified CallConnector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
The Cisco Unified CallConnector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, part of the Cisco Unified Communications system, is a free middleware application that integrates Cisco Unified Contact Center Express with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 (Microsoft CRM). This integration with Microsoft CRM includes productivity-enhancement features for employees such as screen pops, click to dial, and call tracking. The call information collected by the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows companies to make better business decisions based on actual call metrics pertaining to employees or customers.
Agent Capabilities and Benefits
Each Cisco Unified Contact Center Express seat provides optimal flexibility in your contact center by providing full licensing to use the seat as either an agent or a supervisor seat. Agent seats can be either PC or Cisco Unified IP phone-based agent stations. Each seat provides full licensing for Cisco IP Phone Agent, Cisco Supervisor Desktop, Cisco Desktop Administrator, Cisco Historical Reporting Client, and, for Enhanced and Premium, Cisco Agent Desktop and on-demand recording. Even if a PC failure occurs, an agent is fully licensed to continue working through the Cisco IP Phone Agent.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express keeps the agent in touch with every call through critical data and call state information by providing the ability to present a screen pop to the agent for each call, which includes customer-entered data, as well as call state information describing how long the call has been connected to the ACD, how long the call has been in queue, and how long the agent has been talking with the caller.
Cisco Agent Desktop* gives agents tools to access information and respond rapidly to customer requests. Voice contact workflows, the enterprise data pane, and the integrated browser display (screen pop) show agents' customer data as calls are presented, preventing redirection of calls and the necessity for customers to repeat information. Task automation buttons and the personal phone directory allow agents to instantly activate frequently performed functions that shorten response time and automate after-call work to follow up on a customer inquiry. Collaboration tools such as chat and transfer of caller data help keep responses accurate.
Additionally, Cisco Agent Desktop offers the ability to provide workflows that process business rules based on critical call state events, the ability to invoke any CRM or other application able to run on the agent's Microsoft Windows desktop, and the ability to display information in the form of a screen pop from the ACD or IVR subsystem to that application.
When the Cisco Outbound Option with preview dialing is enabled, the Cisco Agent Desktop provides all the controls necessary for agents to participate in outbound campaigns.
Management Capabilities and Benefits
Supervisory Features*
The ability of Cisco Supervisor Desktop to monitor critical performance metrics and actively chat, monitor, record, and send team messages allows managers to coach, train, and encourage agent behavior so that agents consistently perform the job function and process calls efficiently. The ability to send agents scrolling team messages and chat with individual members or the entire team allows supervisors to coach agents, resolve problems, and instantly communicate business changes. Supervisors can coach agents unobtrusively on cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and help agents resolve customer situations.
Within the supervisor desktop, contact center managers can see team performance, agent statistics, and status at a glance using easy-to-navigate tabbed pages and graphical reports. To coach agents, they can silently monitor calls and offer encouragement using chat. They can also initiate call recording for later review and training.
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 desktop. For example, agents may forget to make themselves available to take calls after a break or neglect to log out when away from their workstation for an extended period. With Cisco Supervisor Desktop, 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
The Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Web-based administration provides a run-anywhere, enterprisewide point of control for single- or multisite contact centers. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express transparently integrates Cisco Unified Communications Manager-provisioned information and integrates with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Web-based administration to provide cross access and a common interface. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Administration allows a wide range of real-time reporting statistics across all activity within the contact center, regardless of agent or supervisor location and for all calls in process.
Reporting
The Cisco Unified Contact Center Express solution provides real-time and historical data necessary for mission-critical contact-center reporting. Real-time reports are provided both at the supervisor level (integrated with the Cisco Supervisor Desktop) on a per-agent team basis as well as at the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Administration level across the entire contact center.
The reporting function provides accurate and timely reports on contact-center activity, helping managers make informed decisions regarding staffing levels, contact handling procedures, and technology investments. Standard reporting templates provide automatically operational functions for common reporting needs. Custom reports can extend the standard reporting package to meet specific reporting needs. Furthermore, the open software architecture of Cisco Unified Contact Center Express allows for export of reporting data in a variety of formats.
Cluster Management
When Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is deployed with multiple servers, all servers are members of the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express cluster and can be viewed, monitored, and taken in and out of service. Using open Internet standards and the inherent capabilities of Cisco devices, Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite helps network managers oversee their converged networks while maintaining confidence that their IP telephony environments, including Cisco Unified Contact Center Express, are performing as expected. Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite provides real-time, detailed fault analysis designed specifically for Cisco devices in the IP telephony environment. This focus on Cisco devices facilitates monitoring of Cisco Unified IP Telephony technology-based networks for a variety of fault conditions, analysis of these conditions, and notification of network managers through intelligent traps detailing the problem that has occurred. Functions supporting Cisco Unified Contact Center Express include server discovery, health statistics, subsystem process checks, application run-time status, and other critical network management capabilities.
System Capabilities and Benefits
Open Systems
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 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 interfaces for CTI applications, can integrate with existing contact center solutions, preserving investments in traditional systems and providing a platform for future applications.
Redundant High Availability
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express offers high-availability redundancy for dual server cluster deployments, including support for automatic failover of inbound voice ACD, IVR, and desktop services as well as database replication and failover and load-balanced redundancy for on-demand recording servers.
Integrated Service-Creation Environments
The Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Workflow Editor is the service-creation and scripting environment for mapping business rules to call-flow behavior and call treatments. It can operate from any location on the enterprise WAN, and workflows can be uploaded and run on the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express server. This environment is a visual editor that provides a simple, drag-and-drop, easy-to-understand interface for building powerful, custom, business-communication applications.
Scalability
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express can provide a contact-center-in-a-box for a single server or scale to support up to 300 agents in a multiserver cluster with a redundant high-availability option across a virtual multisite contact center. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express supports a Cisco Customer Interaction Network based on the Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management and Cisco IPCC Peripheral Gateway enabling prerouting, postrouting, and centralized reporting for multiple Cisco Unified Contact Center Express systems across a Cisco Unified Communications WAN.
Security
To help maintain network security in the contact center and throughout the enterprise, Cisco Unified Contact Center Express supports Cisco Security Agent as well as virus-detection software from the major antivirus software vendors. Cisco Security Agent is a host-based intrusion detection system that provides security to mission-critical enterprise servers and hosts. It provides benefits beyond conventional endpoint security solutions such as virus-scanning software and firewalls by identifying and preventing malicious behavior before it can occur. This process helps remove potential known and unknown security risks that threaten enterprise networks and applications. By analyzing behavior rather than relying on signature matching, Cisco Security Agent complements the capabilities of the antivirus software; together, they provide a robust solution to protect your network and reduce operational costs.
Cisco Unified Communications Services
Cisco and its certified partners can help you deploy a secure, resilient Cisco Unified Communications Solution, meeting aggressive deployment schedules and accelerating business advantage. Cisco's portfolio of services is based on proven methodologies for unifying voice, video, data, and mobile applications on fixed and mobile networks.
Cisco's unique lifecycle approach to services defines the requisite activities at each phase of the solution lifecycle. Customized planning and design services focus on creating a solution that meets your business needs. Award-winning technical support increases operational efficiency. Remote management services simplify day-to-day operations, and optimization services enhance solution performance as your business needs change.
Summary
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express offers an integrated, full-featured solution for managing customer voice contacts while retaining all the benefits of fully converged Cisco Unified Communications deployment. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express delivers sophisticated call routing, management, and administration features for departmental, enterprise branch, or small to medium-sized enterprise customer-care needs.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express offers ease of installation, configuration, and application hosting, as well as reduced business application integration complexity, ease of agent administration, increased agent flexibility, and network hosting efficiencies - continuing the evolution toward a true Customer Interaction Network.
*For complete details regarding Cisco Agent Desktop and Cisco Supervisor Desktop for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0, including options available for Standard, Enhanced, and Premium versions, please refer to the Cisco Agent Desktop for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 data sheet.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Features and Specifications
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 is available for Cisco Unified Communications Manager 5.1, 6.0, and 6.1, as well as for Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express 4.2 on integrated services router and Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business platforms.
Note: All capacities stated in this document are system maximums. Actual maximums are a function of the hardware server(s) and mix of features deployed on those servers. Cisco Assessment to Quality (A2Q) bid assurance requires passing bid assurance in presales prior to making a formal offer to a customer. The Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Configuration and Ordering Tool is the required mechanism to submit to and pass bid assurance. The configuration tool provides a structured way to configure software features and required and supported servers, and to automatically bid assure a configuration. It also provides a bill of materials for the configuration.
Note: This document applies only to Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0.2 and later 5.0.x versions. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0.1 feature content differs from that in this document.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express provides support for all critical functional areas of today's contact centers, including:
• Inbound Voice
• Blended Preview Outbound Dialer
• Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager and Web Interaction Manager
• Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization (including Quality Manager, Advanced Quality Manager, and Workforce Manager)
• Third-party integration (for example, with CRM)
• Customer database integration with ODBC or Structured Query Language (SQL)
• IVR
• Real-time and historical reporting
• Agent and supervisor desktops
Please consult the following pages and tables for each area of interest.
Table 1: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Supported Cisco Unified Communications Manager Products
Table 2: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Feature Availability with Cisco Unified Communications Manager 5.1, 6.0, and 6.1; Cisco Unified Communications Express on Cisco integrated services routers; and the Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business.
Licensing
Table 3: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Licensing
Inbound Voice
Table 4: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Inbound Voice
Table 5: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Outbound Voice
Blended Preview Outbound Dialer
Table 6: Reference Capacities for Inbound and Blended Inbound and Outbound Systems
Cisco Unified Workforce Optimization
Table 7: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Quality and Advanced Quality Manager
Table 7: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Workforce Manager
Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager and Web Interaction Managers
Table 1. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Supported Cisco Unified Communications Manager Products
Table 2. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Feature Availability with Cisco Unified Communications Manager 5.1, 6.0, and 6.1
Licensing
Licensing for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express varies by feature. Licenses are either concurrent or named licenses.
Concurrent licensing example: Customer has 3 shifts each of 100 users for a total of 300 unique users. Customer needs to purchase 100 licenses.
Named licensing example: Customer has 3 shifts of 100 users for a total of 300 unique users. Customer needs to purchase 300 licenses.
Table 3. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express 5.0 Licensing