Software Overview
Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Overview
Unified Intelligent Contact Management provides enterprise-wide distribution of multichannel contacts across geographically separated contact centers. Such multichannel contacts are inbound or outbound telephone calls, web collaboration requests, e-mail messages, and chat requests. Unified ICM is an open standards-based solution whose capabilities include routing, queuing, monitoring, and fault tolerance. Unified ICM forms the basis for the Cisco Unified Communications family of products.
The system software functions across environments and across channels.
The system software functions in the older environment of telephone calls delivered over Time-division multiplexing (TDM) lines, of hardware automatic call distributions (ACDs) and interactive voice responses (IVRs), and of call centers centralized around the hardware. The system software can route calls for a single 800 number or for several different numbers. The system software reads information about each incoming call from the public network. The system software also determines the best destination for that call, and returns information to the public network instructing it where to route the call. This process is known as call-by-call routing.
The system software makes routing decisions by executing scripts that can easily be modified. These scripts can use real-time information about activity at the contact centers to find the destination best able to handle the call. You can monitor how the system is handling calls. You can also observe how the system modifies scripts when needed.
The system software functions in the newer environment of multichannel contact delivered through IP connections. These IP connections are of software ACDs and IVRs. The connections are also of contact centers that can be as decentralized as the Internet or as centralized as business practices requirements, not hardware necessities requirements.
The system software functions in the mixed transition environment that involves all of the above.
For detailed information about Unified ICM, refer to the Pre-installation Planning Guide for Cisco Unified ICM and the Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Overview
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE) delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management over an IP infrastructure. It combines multichannel ACD functionality with IP telephony in a unified solution, enabling your company to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure.
Unified CCE provides:
-
Segmentation of customers and monitoring of resource availability
-
Delivery of each contact to the most appropriate resource anywhere in the enterprise
-
Comprehensive customer profiles using contact-related data, such as dialed number (DN), and calling line ID
-
Routing to the most appropriate resource to meet customer needs based on real-time conditions (such as agent skills, availability, and queue lengths)
-
Presence integration to increase caller satisfaction through improved agent performance and knowledge-worker expertise
Unified CCE allows you to smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice applications with Internet applications such as real-time chat, web collaboration, and email. This integration enables a single agent to support multiple interactions simultaneously regardless of which communications channel the customer has chosen. Because each interaction is unique and may require individualized service, Cisco provides contact center solutions to manage customer interactions based on almost any contact attribute.
For detailed information about Unified CCE, refer to the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Installation and Upgrade Guide and the Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise.