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Cisco Unified Contact Center Solutions:
[December 14, 2007]

Cisco Unified Contact Center Solutions:


 
Cisco (News - Alert) Adds New Capabilities to its UCC Portfolio


 
Cisco Systems has recently announced additions to its suite of Contact Center Solutions: 
  • Cisco Unified Contact Center Reporting Portfolio
  • Cisco Unified CRM Connectors
  • Remote Silent Monitoring for Unified Contact Center Enterprise/Hosted
 
Cisco Unified Reporting
The new reporting portfolio is the result of the recent acquisition of Latigent (News - Alert), a leading provider of Web-based business intelligence and analytics reporting solutions, focused on contact centers. Latigent's products are built from the ground up to take advantage of Web 2.0 principles that help enable customers to create flexible, scalable, easily customizable, and intuitive historical and real-time reports for their contact centers.
 
Latigent's BlueVue reporting product enhances Cisco's Unified Customer Contact solutions designed to evolve today's call centers to the Customer Interaction Network — a single, integrated platform. A demonstration of the system showed advanced yet simple to use customizable data and graphical views available to supervisors, managers and executives with a variety of real-time and historical dashboards, charts and grids. Features include:
  • Easy-to-use, wizard-based interface
  • Native ad hoc reporting and customization
  • Highly customizable platform
    • Access levels
    • Feature sets
    • Thresholds and drill downs
    • User Interface attributes
  • Reporting for all Cisco Contact Center solutions
 
BlueVue integrates with legacy contact center platforms and networks, providing multi-channel services and integration with customer relationship management application.
 
Also available is an advanced server option:
  • Extends BlueVue platform to an integrated information portal
  • Power user and Developer tools
    • Unrestricted wizard capabilities
    • User defined data sources
    • RSS, XSLT, Permalinks, HTML post
  • Reporting for all VTG products
  • Integration of third-party data
  • Cradle-to-grave templates
  • Compressed summarization
 
Cisco Unified CRM Connectors
Cisco is introducing pre-built, certified CRM Connectors for a number of major CRM packages:
  • Siebel
  • SAP
  • Salesforce.com (News - Alert)
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • PeopleSoft
 
Unified CRM Connectors provide unified call flows, business processes, and desktops for both call handling and business transaction navigation for popular CRM packages in a turnkey, out-of-the-box support. Among the planned features for the new release are:
  • Single login for CRM application, Unified CCE/ICM and third-party ACD
  • Change CRM/ACD work modes (Ready status) on desktop synchronized with hard phone
  • Deliver phone and agent events to the CRM application where they may be logged
  • View the current call state from the desktop
  • Call control from the desktop: Answer, Drop, Hold, Un-Hold, Blind or Warm Transfers, Conferences
  • Place outbound and consultative calls from the desktop
  • Deliver Call Context Data to the CRM application for screen pop
  • Agent can change call context data for transfer
 
Remote Silent Monitor
Remote Silent Monitor enables anybody to silently monitor agents from a remote location by dialing into the system. 
  • A telephony user interface (TUI) for initiating silent monitoring through a dial-in connection
  • For use with Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise or Hosted
  • Monitor specific agents and / or skill groups
  • Can use supervisor ID / team for authentication and access control or external / customized mechanism
  • Delivered with operational Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal and Unified IP IVR scripts that can be modified by Cisco partner or customer
 
Main Features (subject to change pending initial release scheduled for January 2008): 
  • Transparently supports Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise system with four Unified Communications (News - Alert) Manager clusters, 8,000 agents
  • Can monitor any agent in the enterprise from anywhere
  • No dependencies on NIC cards, SPAN ports, network topology
  • Flexible authentication/access control options
  • Can use Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise supervisor userid and supervisor teams to control access
  • Can use external authentication and access control
  • Flexible call selection methods
  • Select by agentID, Skill Group, select agent from active agent list read out by the system
Your comments, questions and ideas are welcome: [email protected].
 
 
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Ed LaBanca is President & Principal Analyst for CollabGen Inc. He works with CXO's, executives and department managers to improve communications and customer service in contact centers and across the enterprise. Analyst services include comprehensive vendor reports on Unified Communications in the Enterprise and Contact Centers. Consulting services include technology and applications audit, systems and process analysis, design, request for proposals, evaluations and project management.
 


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