Packaged CCE is a predesigned, bounded deployment model of Unified CCE. The core components are deployed as on-box Virtual Machines (VMs) that are described by OVA files downloaded from https://www.cisco.com.

The Packaged CCE VMs provide the essential set of contact center functionality—call and non-voice task processing, prompts and rich VXML scripting, voice response collection, agent selection, queuing, and reporting. With its controlled environment and well-defined configuration and deployment boundaries, Packaged CCE is a robust solution with high availability and solution serviceability. Additional benefits are simplified ordering and deployment rollout, easier operation and maintenance, and Unified CCE Administration—a streamlined, browser-based administration interface for configuring the system and monitoring its health.

Cisco HCS for Contact Center delivers in a hosted environment almost all of the components and features as a Unified CCE solution. Cisco HCS for Contact Center supports a subset of the Unified CCE models. You, as the service provider, manage the maintenance of the hosted environment. For your customers, this means lower hardware costs, easier and faster deployment, and no need to worry about upgrades, maintenance staff, and unpredictable costs.

Cisco HCS for Contact Center has an aggregation layer and a shared management layer. It combines Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution components with the multiple network connections and route requests to the dedicated customer instances. The shared aggregation consists of a Hosted Collaboration Solution SBC for interfacing to a PSTN. The shared management consists of UCDM, Unified CCDM, HCM-F, Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance (PCA), Cisco UCS Manager, VMware vCenter, and Cisco ASA (Firewall/NAT).

Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE) is a solution that delivers intelligent call routing, network-to-desktop Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management to contact center agents over an IP network. Unified CCE combines software IP automatic call distribution (ACD) functionality with Cisco Unified Communications to enable companies to deploy an advanced, distributed contact center infrastructure rapidly.

This design guide describes the deployment models and their implications including scalability, fault tolerance, and interaction between the solution components.

The Unified CCE product integrates with Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal, Cisco VoIP Gateways, and Cisco Unified IP Phones. Together these products provide contact center solutions to achieve intelligent call routing, multichannel ACD functionality, voice response unit (VRU) functionality, network call queuing, and consolidated enterprise-wide reporting. Unified CCE can optionally integrate with Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Manager to network with legacy ACD systems while providing a smooth migration path to a converged communications platform.

The Unified CCE solution is designed for implementation in both single and multisite contact centers. Unified CCE uses your existing IP network to lower administrative expenses and to include branch offices, home agents, and knowledge workers in your contact center. The following figure illustrates a typical Unified CCE setup.

The Unified CCE solution consists primarily of four Cisco software products:

• Unified Communications infrastructure—Cisco Unified Communications Manager

• Queuing and self-service—Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP)

  Note	Non-Reference Designs can also use Unified IP IVR for this purpose.

• Contact center routing and agent management—Unified CCE. The major components are CallRouter, Logger, Peripheral Gateway, and the Administration & Data Server/Administration Client.

• Agent desktop software—Cisco Finesse

  Note	Only Non-Reference Designs that use the Avaya PG or the Parent/Child topology can use CTI OS desktops. Cisco Finesse is the required desktop for all other contact center enterprise solutions.

The solution is built on the Cisco IP Telephony infrastructure, which includes:

• Cisco Unified IP Phones

• Cisco Voice Gateways

• Cisco LAN/WAN infrastructure

You can use these gateways in your solution:

• Cisco Voice TDM gateway

• Cisco Unified Border Element

• Cisco VXML gateway

Note	Voice Browser refers to either VXML Gateways or Cisco Virtualized Voice Browser (VVB).

TDM gateways and CUBE gateways can act as both ingress (for inbound calls) and egress gateway (for outbound calls) in a specific deployment.

These types of gateways can be colocated or exist on separate physical gateways.

Cisco IOS-XE does not support VXML gateway functionality.

Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal combines open-standards support for speech with intelligent application development and industry-best call control.

Unified Customer Voice Portal (Unified CVP) is a software application that runs on Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) hardware or specification-based equivalents. Unified CVP provides prompting, collecting, queuing, and call control services using standard web-based technologies. Its architecture is distributed, fault tolerant, and highly scalable. With CVP, voice terminates on Cisco Voice Browsers that interact with the Unified CVP application server using HTTP(S) (speech) and SIP (call control). Unified CVP includes the following subcomponents:

• CVP Call Server

• CVP VXML Server

• CVP Media Server

• CVP Reporting Server

The Unified CVP software tightly integrates with the Unified CCE software for application control. Unified CVP interacts with Unified CCE using the Voice Response Unit (VRU) Peripheral Gateway Interface. The Unified CCE scripting environment controls the execution of building-block functions such as play media, play data, menu, and collect information. The Unified CCE script can invoke external VXML applications for execution by the CVP VXML Server.

The CVP Call Studio is an Eclipse-based IDE for developing VRU applications. The VXML Server is the application server which hosts those VRU applications. The VXML Server handles sophisticated, high-volume VRU applications. It can also interact with custom or third-party J2EE-based services. You can achieve load balancing with an optional CUSP server or the built-in SIP Server Group in CVP.

Unified CVP can support multiple grammars for prerecorded announcements in several languages. CVP can optionally provide automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech capability. CVP can also access customer databases and applications through the Unified CCE software.

Unified CVP also provides a queuing platform for the Unified CCE solution. Voice and video calls can remain queued on CVP until they are routed to a contact center agent (or external system). The system can play back music or videos while the caller is on hold. When Unified CCE routes the call to an agent, the agent can send videos to a caller from the agent desktop application.

Unified Contact Center Enterprise (Unified CCE) provides these contact center features:

• Agent state management

• Agent selection

• Call and task routing and queue control

• VRU interface

• CTI Desktop screen pops

• Contact center reporting data

Unified CCE runs in VMs on Cisco Unified Computing System servers or exact equivalents. This table lists the major components of Unified CCE:

Cisco Virtualized Voice Browser (Cisco VVB) provides a platform for interpreting VXML documents. When an incoming call arrives at the contact center, Cisco VVB allocates a VXML port that represents the VoIP endpoint. Cisco VVB sends HTTP requests to the Unified CVP VXML server. The Unified CVP VXML server executes the request and sends back a dynamically generated VXML document.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) is the main call processing component of a Cisco Collaboration System. It manages and switches VoIP calls among IP phones. Unified CVP interacts primarily with Unified CM as a means for sending PSTN-originated calls to Unified CCE agents.

The following common scenarios require calls to Unified CVP to originate from Unified CM endpoints:

• An office worker (not an agent) on an IP phone dials an internal help desk number.

• An agent begins a consultative transfer that gets routed to a Unified CVP queue point.

Unified CM communicates with Unified CCE through the Java Telephony Application Programming Interface (JTAPI). In a fault-tolerant design, a Unified CM cluster supports thousands of agents. The number of agents and the number of busy hour call attempts (BHCA) supported within a cluster varies and must be sized according to Cisco guidelines.

Typically, when designing a Unified CCE solution, you first define the deployment scenario. You determine the arrival point (or points) for the voice traffic and the location (or locations) of the contact center agents. You then determine the sizing of the individual components within the Unified CCE design. This step includes determining how many Unified CM clusters and servers within each cluster are needed.

You can add a 2000 Agent Reference Design solution to an existing Unified CM deployment. In this case, the existing Unified CM cluster is an off-box replacement of the on-box cluster in the standard Reference Design layout. With this configuration, two of the subscribers must be dedicated to CCE. All devices on these subscribers must be SIP. In the global topology, each remote site can have its own Unified CM cluster.

Note	Cisco Unified Communications Manager is supported on-box and off-box. Cisco Business Edition is supported off-box only. Move the CUCM VMs off-box before upgrading them to Release 12.5.

In a Unified CVP environment, Unified CM can be an Ingress or Egress Gateway. It is more common for Unified CM to be an Egress Gateway. Calls typically are from the PSTN, queued by Unified CVP, and then switched to Unified CM for handling by an agent. If the call is from an IP phone, not a PSTN, the Unified CM is an Ingress Voice Gateway from the perspective of Unified CVP.

Cisco Finesse is the next-generation agent and supervisor desktop for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, providing benefits across various communities that interact with your customer service organization. It is designed to improve collaboration by enhancing the customer and customer service representative experience.

The Cisco Finesse agent and supervisor desktop for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise integrates traditional contact center functions into a thin-client desktop. A critical characteristic is that every desktop is browser-based and implemented through a Web 2.0 interface. No client-side installations are required. This reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Cisco Finesse also provides a Web 2.0 software development kit (SDK) and gadgets to enable developers to quickly implement the desktop.

You deploy the Cisco Finesse server on a dedicated VMware virtual machine (VM) that runs on the Cisco Voice Operating System (VOS) platform. The Cisco Finesse server is a required component for the Cisco Finesse desktop solution. The Cisco Finesse software is fault-tolerant and deploys on redundant VMs. Both Cisco Finesse servers are simultaneously active. One Cisco Finesse server acts as a publisher and replicates configuration data to the subscriber in the redundant pair.

The Cisco Finesse server connects to the CTI server on the Agent PG. Authentication with Unified CCE is provided over a connection to the Administration & Data Server. If you enable Single Sign-On (SSO), the Cisco Identity Service provides authentication.

Cisco Finesse requires that you deploy the Administration & Data Server with a backup Administration & Data Server. If the primary Administration & Data Server goes down, Cisco Finesse connects to the backup server for authentication so that agents can still sign in.

The Cisco Finesse server exposes supported client operations through a Representational State Transfer (REST) API. The REST API shields the developer from many of the details surrounding the CTI server wire protocol.

Cisco Finesse clients connect to the Cisco Finesse server over a web browser that points to the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the Cisco Finesse server.

You deploy the Cisco Finesse server in an active/active deployment, where both Cisco Finesse servers connect to the active CTI server on the Agent PG. The standard Cisco VOS replication mechanism provides redundancy for persistent configuration data on the Cisco Finesse servers.

Cisco Unified Intelligence Center (Unified Intelligence Center) is a web-based reporting application that provides easily consumable Live Data, real-time, and historical reporting for Unified CCE and Unified CVP. It allows supervisors and business users to report from a single interface on the details of multichannel contacts across the solution. You can extend the boundaries of traditional reporting to an information portal where you can integrate and share data throughout the organization.

You deploy the Unified Intelligence Center server on a dedicated VM that runs on the Cisco Voice Operating System (VOS) platform. In the 2000 Agent Reference Design, Unified Intelligence Center is coresident with Live Data and the Cisco Identity Service.

Unified Intelligence Center offers high scalability, performance, and advanced features such as data integration with other Cisco Unified Communications products or third-party data sources. Unified Intelligence Center incorporates a security model that defines different access and capabilities for specific users.

Cisco Unified Intelligence Center offers both a web-based reporting application and an administration interface. Unified Intelligence Center reporting capabilities include the following:

• Dashboard mashups

• Powerful grid presentations of reports with sorting and grouping

• Chart and gauge presentations of reports

• Association of multiple report displays with the same report definition

• Custom filters

• Custom thresholds to alert on the data

• Stock report templates for contact center enterprise data

• Ability to report data from MS SQL Server and Informix databases

Administrators can use Unified Intelligence Center to control access to features, reports, and data by granting privileges only to authorized individual users or groups of users. For example, you can assign each supervisor to a group of agents, skills, and call types that are the most relevant to them. This allows each report to provide focused, actionable insights into data that is appropriate to their role.

Several features in this product allow you to extend the Unified Intelligence Center platform beyond traditional reporting and into an enterprise-wide information portal. You can use data from nontraditional sources to improve business efficiency and effectiveness.

The Unified CCE Reporting solution provides an interface to access Live Data, real-time, and historical data for the contact center.

The reporting solution consists of the following components:

• Cisco Unified Intelligent Center—Reporting user interfaces

• Configuration and Reporting Data—Contained on one or more Administration & Data Servers

The Cisco Remote Expert solution enables virtual face-to-face meetings between callers and agents. The contacts can happen at a physical branch or from their PCs, tablets, or smartphones. Customers can connect with remote advisors (experts and agents) in seconds in a rich video-enabled collaboration session. Your contact center enterprise solution can incorporate Remote Expert to help control costs, make decisions faster, improve customer intimacy, and scale scarce resources.

Remote Expert is an end-to-end, multichannel collaboration platform that delivers a consistent experience across multiple devices. It provides a sales and services enablement platform that can benefit customers in numerous ways. Your Remote Expert solution can:

• Deliver an engaging experience for your customers.

• Expand customer access to your experts.

• Scale expertise and drive the productivity of financial experts.

• Provide advanced collaboration capabilities such as document and screen sharing, screen annotation, signature capture, and session recording.

Video Remote Expert allows video callers to be queued. Optionally, with CVP Video In Queue (ViQ), the caller can interact through high-definition video prompts. They can navigate a video menu using DTMF keys for video self-service or receive video while waiting for an agent.

You can deploy Cisco Remote Expert in the following modes: Remote Expert Branch: Immersive/Kiosk mode and Remote Expert Mobile.

The Cisco Unified SIP Proxy (CUSP) is a high-performance, highly available Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) server for centralized routing and SIP signaling normalization. By forwarding requests between call-control domains, CUSP enables you to route sessions within enterprise and service provider networks. The application aggregates SIP elements and applies highly developed routing rules. These rules enhance control, management, and flexibility of SIP networks.

Unified CVP supports only the CUSP Server.

In a Unified CVP deployment, a CUSP Server sees incoming calls from the TDM Gateway, from Unified CVP, and from the UCM SIP trunk. With a SIP back-to-back user agent in CVP, the initial call setup from the proxy involves an inbound call immediately followed by an outbound call (whether for VRU or to ACD). Later in the call, CVP may transfer the call to an agent, which involves an outbound leg, and reinvites to the inbound leg. A ringtone service setup is also available which also involves a separate outbound call and a reinvite to the caller. Reinvites on the caller leg occur at CVP transfer or during supplementary services.

The CUSP Server routes SIP messages among SIP endpoints. The CUSP Server enables solution wide SIP-endpoint high availability and load balancing. The CUSP Server is designed to support multiple SIP endpoints of various types and to implement load balancing and failover among these endpoints. Deployment of a SIP proxy in the solution enables a more centralized configuration of the dial plan routing configuration.

You can configure a SIP proxy with multiple static routes to do load balancing and failover with outbound calls. The static routes can point to an IP address or a DNS.

Domain Name System (DNS) Service Record (SRV) is not qualified for use on the CUSP Server. However, you can use it for the devices that must reach the CUSP Server, such as Unified CVP, Ingress Voice Gateway, and Unified CM.

You can deploy Unified CVP without a CUSP Server, depending on the design and complexity of the solution. In such cases, some of the functions that a CUSP Server provides are provided by the Unified CVP Server SIP service.

Following are the benefits of using a CUSP Server:

• You can use priority and weight routing with the routes for load balancing and failover.

• If a CUSP Server exists in your SIP network, then Unified CVP acts as an additional SIP endpoint. The Unified CVP fits incrementally into the existing SIP network.

If you do not use a CUSP Server, then the Ingress Voice Gateways and Unified CMs must point directly to Unified CVP. In such a deployment, perform the following tasks:

• Perform load balancing using DNS SRV lookups from gateway to DNS Server; balance SIP calls using this procedure.

• Perform load balancing of calls outbound from Unified CVP (outbound call leg) using DNS SRV lookups.

The contact center enterprise solutions use Enterprise Chat and Email (ECE) to provide a multichannel contact center.

For email, ECE enables organizations to intelligently route and process inbound emails, webform inquiries, faxes, and letters. For web-chat, ECE provides agents with a comprehensive set of tools for serving customers in real time. It enables call center agents to provide immediate personalized service to customers through text chat messaging and page-push abilities.

Deploy the ECE Web Server on an external server. You can place that server either in the same site as the ECE Data Server or in a DMZ if customer chat interactions require that.

Silent monitoring allows supervisors to monitor the conversations of agents within their team. Supervisors cannot participate actively in the conversations and agents and callers are not aware that they are being monitored. Cisco Finesse provides solution support for silent monitoring.

Cisco Finesse supports Unified Communications Silent Monitoring only. You configure silent monitoring on Unified Communications Manager. No additional configuration is required on the Cisco Finesse server.

Note

Even for regions that are configured to use G.711, Unified CCE uses G.722 as the default codec for devices that support G.722. However G.722 is not supported with Silent Monitoring and Call Recording based on Unified Communications Manager. To disable this default, in Unified Communications Manager Administration, go to Enterprise Parameters and set Advertise G.722 Codec to disabled.

Note	If voice streams are encrypted, silent monitoring does not work correctly. Although the voice streams can still be captured, the silent monitoring service cannot decode them correctly.

You can install the Domain Name System (DNS) Server anywhere in the network. The server resolves hostnames to IP addresses. Contact center enterprise solutions can make both Type A record lookups and SRV Type record lookups. When a DNS Server responds slowly, is unavailable, or is across the WAN, you see a performance impact on the solution.

The contact center can use the DNS Server during SIP interactions in the following situations:

• When a call arrives at an Ingress Voice Gateway, the dial peer can use DNS to alternate calls between the two SIP Proxy Servers. The SIP Proxy Servers can also use DNS to distribute incoming calls among multiple SIP Services. If your contact center does not use SIP Proxy Servers, the Ingress Voice Gateway can use DNS directly to distribute inbound calls among multiple SIP Services.

• Unified CCE directs the SIP service to transfer calls to the VRU leg and can use DNS to alternate such requests between two SIP Proxy Servers. If your contact center does not use SIP Proxy Servers, the SIP Service can use DNS directly to distribute VRU legs among multiple Voice Browsers.

• The SIP Proxy cannot use DNS SRV to transfer an outbound call to an agent through a SIP Proxy Server. Configure the SIP Proxy with multiple static routes to do load balancing and failover. The static routes can point to an IP address or a regular DNSA host record. If your contact center does not use SIP Proxy Servers, the SIP Service can use DNS to locate the IP address of the target agent.

• Cisco Finesse uses the DNS Server for hostname resolution and reverse lookup during installation.

• Unified CCE uses the DNS Server for hostname resolution and reverse lookup for server inventory in the Unified CCE Administration tool.

The use of the DNS Server for SIP routing is optional in Unified CVP. You do not need to have a dedicated DNS Server, as the existing DNS server handles the additional load of Unified CVP. For every call destined for Unified CVP that comes into the network, there are approximately three to four DNS lookups. You can determine the DNS queries per second by determining the calls per second for the solution, and multiplying that number by 4.

The contact center needs DNS lookups for DNS SRV queries, not necessarily for A record queries. You can also configure A record lookups locally in the system file. You can use Unified CVP Server Groups to avoid DNS SRV lookups.

In Contact Center Enterprise Reference Designs, load balancers are used in redirect mode only. You can use third-party load balancers for the following purposes in your contact center enterprise solution:

• For access to the Cisco Finesse sign-in page

• When you use the Finesse REST API directly

• With Unified CVP

• For access to the Unified CCE Administration tool sign-in page

• When you use the Unified CCE Administration REST API directly

• With Cisco Unified Intelligence Center

• With Cisco Unified Intelligence Center Administration Console

For more information on load balancer requirements, see the Compatibility Matrix for your contact center enterprise solution.

The Recording option provides network-based storage of media, including audio and video, with rich recording metadata. You can record, play back, and live stream the media. You can use this option for compliance, quality management, and agent coaching. The platform provides an efficient, cost-effective foundation for capturing, preserving, and mining conversations for business intelligence.

Note	Unified CVP has a network-based recording (NBR) feature to support software-based forking for Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) streams.

Note	For ERSPAN support on UCS B Series for any third-party recording application, consult the vendor's application requirements.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Server and Text-to-Speech (TTS) Server provides speech recognition services and text-to-speech services for a Voice Browser. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables callers to verbally choose menu options. For example, an Automated Attendant can ask who you are calling and then use your reply to connect the call. Text-to-Speech (TTS) converts plain text (UNICODE) into speech. For example, Voice Browsers can stream media from a text-to-speech (TTS) server.

ASR/TTS license use depends on what you use for a voice browser. The VXML Gateway does not release the ASR/TTS license until the end of a call. Cisco VVB releases the license when the script no longer requires it.

Communication between the ASR and TTS servers and the Voice Browser uses Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP). See the Compatability Matrix for details on the support for MRCP versions.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a rich feature set to support the ASR grammars. You can implement and support inline grammars which pass the set of acceptable customer responses to the Voice Browser. You can also use external grammars, where Unified CCE passes a pointer to an external grammar source. The VXML Server adds this pointer to the VXML document that it sends to the Voice Browser. The Voice Browser then uses the grammar to check ASR input from the caller. In this case, the customer creates the grammar file. A third type of grammar is the built-in grammar. For a complete explanation of grammar formats, see the W3C website at http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-grammar/.

When the VXML Server directly passes the text for TTS to the gateway, we refer to the action as inline TTS. A separate server that communicates with the Voice Browser through MRCP performs the speech recognition and speech synthesis. The ASR and TTS engine also supports (with limitations) voice recognition and synthesis for multiple languages.

For information on third-party ASR or TTS software and servers, see your solution's Compatibility Matrix.

Wallboards enable you to monitor, in real time, the service that you are providing to your customers. Wallboards display information on customer service metrics such as number of calls waiting, waiting call length, and Service levels.

Workforce Management (WFM) enables you to schedule multiple queues and sites. You can use a single WFM implementation worldwide. WFM also enables you to manage key performance indicators and real-time adherence to schedules.

Your users (agent, supervisor, scheduler, and administrator) can access WFM with a web browser. Because you avoid the installation of a thick client, WFM is ideally suited to a highly distributed workforce environment.

With Agent Greeting, you can play a configurable, automated greeting to callers. Every caller receives a clear, well-paced, language-appropriate, and enthusiastic introduction from the answering agent. Agent Greeting relieves your agents from speaking opening scripts. Instead, your agents can spends the time reviewing the desktop screen pop-ups while the greeting plays.

Recording a greeting is much the same as recording a message for voice mail. Depending on how you set up the call center, agents record different greetings that play for different types of callers (for example, an English greeting for English speakers or an Italian greeting for Italian speakers).

Agent Greeting is available to agents and supervisors who use IP Phones with Built-in-Bridge (BiB) that are controlled by the Unified CCE and Unified CM.

In contact center enterprise solutions, agents can handle both inbound and outbound contacts. Contact center managers in need of outbound campaign solutions can take advantage of the enterprise view that Cisco Unified CCE maintains over agent resources. Cisco Outbound Option supports agent-based and VRU-based campaigns. For agent-based campaigns, it also supports transfer of calls to a VRU for answering machines or to meet regulatory requirements for abandoned calls. A VRU campaign does not use agents, instead the call is directed to a VRU which plays a recorded message to answered calls.

The Cisco Outbound Option Dialer provides outbound dialing functionality along with the existing inbound capabilities of the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise. This application enables the contact center to dial customer contacts and direct contacted customers to agents. With Cisco Outbound Dialer, you can configure a contact center for automated outbound activities.

The Outbound Option Dialer is a software-only process that coresides on the Unified CM PG. The SIP Dialer process communicates with Voice Gateways or CUBE, Outbound Option Campaign Manager, CTI Server, and MR PIM. The Dialer communicates with the Campaign Manager to retrieve outbound customer contact records and to report outbound call disposition (including live answer, answering machine, RNA, and busy). The Dialer communicates with the Voice Gateway to place outbound calls. The Dialer communicates with the CTI Server to monitor skill group activity and to perform third-party call control for agent phones. The SIP Dialer communicates with the MR PIM to submit the route requests to select an available agent.

The Outbound Option Dialer can dial customers on behalf of all agents located on its peripheral. The Dialer is configured with routing scripts that can run in the following modes:

• Full blended mode-An agent can handle inbound and outbound calls

• Scheduled modes-For example, 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (0800 to 1200) in inbound mode and 12:01 to 5:00 p.m. (1201 to 1700) in outbound mode

• Completely in outbound mode

If blended mode is enabled, the Dialer competes with inbound calls for agents. The Dialer does not reserve more agents than are configured in the administrative script Outbound Percent variable. If all agents are busy, then the Dialer does not attempt to reserve any additional agents.

You can deploy Outbound Option in several ways to achieve more or less high availability:

• Single Campaign Manager, Outbound Option Import, and Database—This is a non-fault tolerant configuration of the subcomponents that direct operation of the SIP Dialers. If the Campaign Manager or Outbound Option Import goes down, you lose outbound calling until they come back online. This configuration can direct multiple Dialers.

• Redundant Campaign Managers, Outbound Option Import, and Databases—This fault-tolerant configuration includes redundant subcomponents that operate in a warm-standby mode. If the active Campaign Manager or Outbound Option Import goes down, your solution fails over to the standby subcomponents. This configuration requires more bandwidth to keep the sides in synch. It also requires more disk space to maintain the duplicate records.

• Redundant SIP Dialers—Your solution can include one pair of redundant SIP Dialers for each Agent PG pair. You do not have to include a Dialer pair with every Agent PG pair. The Campaign Manager can load-balance across the available Dialers.

• Multiple Voice Gateways and Unified SIP Proxy servers—You can increase high availability by adding a Unified SIP Proxy pair for each Dialer. You can then add extra voice gateways for each Unified SIP Proxy pair. This enables you to increase the calls made by each Dialer to more than a single voice gateway can support. The solution balances the load across the available instances.

Cisco Outbound Option supports Call Progress Analysis (CPA) configuration on a campaign basis. When you enable this feature, the SIP Dialer instructs the Voice Gateway or CUBE to analyze the media stream. The gateway determines the nature of the call (such as voice, answering machine, modem, or fax detection).

Note	Virtual CUBE does not support CPA. Use a dedicated physical gateway if your solution needs CPA.

Courtesy Callback gives a caller the option to have an agent return their call. This option limits the time a caller waits on the phone for an agent to answer.

Each call has a calculated Estimated Wait Time (EWT). When a caller's EWT approaches zero, the script places a call back to the caller. When the caller answers, the script inserts the caller back into the queue with their original order. The caller reaches an agent in the same time as if they had stayed on the phone.

Call Context refers to the attributes and data that are associated with a call.

You can integrate your contact center with an external database. Database integration provides create, update, and retrieve operations on tables in the external database. Database integration uses the Database Element in the CVP Call Studio.

Database Lookup is an optional feature that allows you to read data from an external database and use that information within a routing script or administrative script.

For example, create a script that uses an external SQL database to lookup a caller's ANI and determine if the caller is a silver or gold customer.

You must designate a single key column as the SQL primary key. Use an If node to reference database columns accessed by the DB Lookup node. In this example, use the If node to determine if the caller is a silver or gold customer.

When the DB Lookup node is executed, it attempts to query a row of data from the external database. If the node is executed as a part of an admin script, it will be called at regular intervals to check for changes as scheduled. If the node is executed as a part a routing script, it will be a database query from the DB Worker thread.

For details on how to create a database and use it in the script, see https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/116215-configure-dblookup-00.html

Note	If the external remote database is on SQL Server 2017 version, you have to install the ODBC Driver 17 manually on the server hosting the external database. Download the ODBC Driver 17 from Microsoft.

To monitor and control the phones, the contact center solutions associate phones with a JTAPI user ID in Unified CM. When you use Extension Mobility or Extension Mobility Cross Cluster, you can associate an Extension Mobility device profile instead. In a Unified CCE environment, you associate the IP phones or the corresponding Extension Mobility device profiles with Unified CCE JTAPI user IDs. When an agent desktop signs in, the PIM requests a subscriber to allow the PIM to begin monitoring and controlling that phone. Until the agent signs in, the subscriber does not allow Unified CCE to monitor or control that phone. If the device or the corresponding Extension Mobility device profile is not associated with a Unified CCE JTAPI user ID, then the agent sign-in request fails.

Using Extension Mobility Cross Cluster (EMCC), when a Unified CCE PIM phone registers to the local cluster after Extension Mobility sign in, the phone looks like an agent situated across a WAN. The Unified CCE peripheral manages the agent devices based on the Extension Mobility profile rather than on a phone device in the Application User on the cluster. For more information, see the Cisco Collaboration System Solution Reference Network Designs at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/unified-communications/unified-communications-manager-callmanager/products-implementation-design-guides-list.html.

You can associate Extension Mobility devices using two methods; either by device or by user profile. Associate the Extension Mobility profile to the CCE Application User on Unified Communications Manager.

Configuring the EM Profile, instead of the device, provides more flexibility in which phones agents can use in the call center. Configuring the phone device limits which devices the agents can use. The option that you use in a contact center depends on the customer business case.

By default, the contact center enterprise solutions accept incoming calls using the mu-law codecs. Your contact center can use the a-law codec instead. To use a-law, change the default values in CVP, Unified CM, and your VXML or Ingress Gateways. This table lists the audio codec support for various functions.

Note	In order to avoid transcoders and universal transcoders, use both G.711 and G.729 codecs for inbound calls and agents. Use G.729 as the first codec in your preference list to save bandwidth on the WAN.

Mobile Agent enables an agent to sign in from anywhere with any PSTN phone and a broadband VPN connection for agent desktop communications. The agent functions just as an agent sitting in your contact center with a Cisco IP Phone. Mobile agent uses a pair of CTI ports which serve as proxies to connect the agent and the caller.

Note	Mobile Agent cannot use IPv6-enabled CTI ports.

Each PG can support fewer Mobile Agents than normal agents. But, you can add extra PGs to support up to the normal maximum active agents that are allowed in the Reference Designs.

Your contact center enterprise solution can support both normal phone extensions and ACD (contact center) phone extensions. How you combine these types can affect your contact center.

You can assign phone lines to Unified CM clusters as follows:

• You can mix normal and ACD extensions in the same cluster.

• You can separate the ACD extensions into specific clusters and the normal extensions into other clusters.

You can also assign each agent's phone extensions to their device in several ways.

Note

Unified CCE supports E.164 dial plans and provides partial support for the ‘+’ prefix. In 2000 Agent Reference Designs, a coresident Unified CM can support a maximum of 2000 phones. This includes your phones for all types of agents, whether contact center agents or back-office workers. If your solution requires more than 2000 phones, use an off-box Unified CM instead.

A Post Call Survey takes place after normal call treatment. Typically, you use the survey to determine whether a customer was satisfied with the call experience. You configure a call flow that sends the call to a DNIS for the Post Call Survey after the agent disconnects from the caller.

Your VRU asks callers whether they want to participate in a Post Call Survey. If they choose to do so, they are automatically transferred to the Post Call Survey after the normal call flow completes.

Precision Routing is a routing feature in Unified CCE. Precision Routing enhances and can replace traditional routing.

Traditional routing maps all an agent's skills into a hierarchy of business needs. However, traditional routing is restricted by its single dimensional nature. Precision Routing provides multidimensional routing with simple configuration, scripting, and reporting. The feature records varying proficiencies in a skill, rather than just possession of the skill. These multiple attributes with proficiencies more accurately expose the capabilities of each agent. The greater accuracy in routing brings more value to the business.

You can use a combination of attributes to create multidimensional precision queues. Unified CCE scripting can dynamically map the precision queues to match a caller's needs with the best available agent.

For more information on Precision Routing, see the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Features Guide at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-enterprise/products-feature-guides-list.html.

The Single Sign-on (SSO) feature authenticates and authorizes agent and supervisor access to the contact center solution applications and services. The authentication process validates the identity of a user: "you are who you say you are." The authorization process confirms that an authenticated user is permitted to perform the requested action: "you can do what you are asking to do." When you enable SSO in the contact center solution, users only sign in once to gain access to all their Cisco browser-based applications and services. Access to Cisco administrator applications is not available through SSO.

SSO requires the following:

• A third-party Identity Provider (IdP)

• A Cisco Identity Service (Cisco IdS) cluster

When an SSO-enabled user signs in, the Cisco IdS interacts first with your IdP to authenticate the user. When the user is authenticated, the Cisco IdS confirms with the accessed Cisco services to confirm that the user is authorized for the requested role. When the user is both authenticated and authorized, the Cisco IdS issues an access token that allows the user to access the application. The access token enables the user to switch between the authorized contact center applications for that session without presenting credentials again.

Whisper Announcement plays a brief, prerecorded message to an agent just before the agent connects with each caller. The announcement plays only to the agent; the caller hears ringing while the announcement plays.

The announcement can contain information about the caller that helps prepare the agent to handle the call. The information can include caller language preference, choices the caller made from a menu (Sales, Service), customer status (Platinum, Gold, Regular), and so on.

After you enable Whisper Announcement, you specify which announcements to play in the call routing scripts. The script chooses which announcement to play based on various inputs. For example, different scripts might play for different dialed numbers, customer ID lookups in your customer database, or selections the caller made from a VRU menu.

The Comprehensive call flow can route and transfer calls across your VoIP network. For example, you can use this model to offer VRU services, and to queue calls for routing to an agent. Callers reach a VRU initially. If they need help from an agent, their call receives queue treatment and transfers to an agent. You can also transfer calls between agents. Unified CVP and Unified CCE pass call data between these endpoints and provide reporting for all calls.

The Comprehensive call flow has the following features:

• Allows callers to access the contact center through local, long distance, or toll-free numbers terminating at the ingress voice gateways, and from VoIP endpoints.

• Provides VRU, including integrated self-service applications, queuing, and initial prompt and collect, and IP switching capabilities.

• Can route and queue calls to Unified CCE agents.

• Must use SIP.

• Provides the video VRU, video queuing, and video agent capabilities.

• Use an optional Unified CVP VXML Server.

• Prompt or collect data using optional ASR and TTS services.

The following figure shows the logical view of the contact center enterprise topology. Agents that are local to the site are not shown.

There are three topology models for contact center enterprise solutions:

• Centralized Deployments—Servers colocated in single main site

• Distributed Deployments—Servers distributed across different geographic sites

• Global Deployments—Remote Peripheral Gateway (PG) and peripheral

Note	The Main Site can use either a Centralized or a Distributed topology. A Remote Site can be geographically colocated with the Data Center. You can have up to 150 Remote Sites

A centralized site can contain all the Unified CCE base model components. In a centralized data center, the agents, supervisors, and administrators are local to the data center. A centralized site can also include multiple agent locations.

In the local agent deployment scenario, the agents, supervisors, and administrators are local to the site.

Globalization, security, and disaster recovery considerations are driving business to diversify locations across multiple regions. In addition, organizations want to distribute workloads between servers, share network resources effectively, and increase the availability of critical applications. Geographically redundant sites split critical applications across two data centers. Enterprises deploy geographically redundant sites to minimize planned or unplanned downtime and share data across regions.

Geographically redundant sites have a load balancer in each data center.

Global Deployments enable the Service Provider to deploy a single contact center available worldwide with a centralized main site and global access. This reduces deployment costs by eliminating multiple customer instances.

You can locate the Unified CM in a centralized or remote site or a customer premise. The following global deployment topologies are supported:

• Remote CVP deployment

• Remote Unified CM deployment

• Remote CVP and Unified CM deployment

• Remote MR PG deployment with multichannel options

Remote agent support provides Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), contact distribution, and reporting capabilities to remote agents in branch offices or at home, through either a broadband network connection or their home phone line. Unified CCE provides identical user interfaces and feature functions to agents regardless of agent location.

The Unified Mobile Agent feature gives the contact center the flexibility to adapt to a fast-moving mobile workforce. Agents can choose their destination phone number during sign-in time and change the number as often as they want. Agents can be on any phone device on any third-party switch infrastructure.

Unified CCE remote office features help companies to use existing and on-demand resources and fully extend CTI functions across the extended enterprise.

Remote office options include:

• Office with Unified CCE agents

• Office with agent and a local trunk

• Cisco Virtual Office

• Mobile Agent

Unified Contact Center Management Portal (Unified CCMP) provides an easy browser UI to streamline day-to-day provisioning and configuration operations. Your contact center managers, team leads, and administrators can use this tool. The management portal provides these benefits:

• A simple browser interface for performing basic administrative tasks such as moving, adding, or modifying phones, agents, skill groups, and teams

• A unified configuration for tenant provisioning of both the contact center components and the Unified CM components

• A partitioned system that supports multiple business units with complete autonomy

• A hierarchical administration to support multiple business roles with limited scopes

• Audit trail reports that detail configuration changes and usage

The contact center enterprise solutions include two service creation environments:

• Unified CVP Call Studio—The Call Studio is a platform for rapidly creating, managing, and deploying sophisticated dynamic VXML self-service applications. The Call Studio application runs in the Eclipse framework. You do not need knowledge of Eclipse to work with the Call Studio. The Call Studio includes plug-ins for voice application development, Java programming, and many other features provided by Eclipse.

• Unified CCE Script Editor—The Script Editor is a tool for creating, updating, scheduling, and monitoring your routing scripts and administrative scripts.

For managing a Unified Communications deployment, customers are encouraged to use the Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance product. Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance is a member of the Cisco Unified Communications family of products and provides a comprehensive and efficient solution for network management, provisioning, and monitoring of Cisco Unified Communications deployments.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance monitors and evaluates the current status of both the IP communications infrastructure and the underlying transport infrastructure in your network. Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance uses open interfaces such as SNMP and HTTP to remotely poll data from different devices in the IP communications deployment.

Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance is a comprehensive video and voice assurance and management system with a set of monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting capabilities that help ensure end users receive a consistent, high-quality video and voice collaboration experience. You deploy Prime Collaboration in Managed Service Provider (MSP) mode. The following are the key features of Cisco Prime Collaboration.

• Voice and Video Unified Dashboard

• Device Inventory Management

• Voice and Video Endpoint Monitoring

• Diagnostics

• Fault Management

• Reports

• Live Contact Center topology with link status, device status, device performance, device 360

• Contact Center device discovery

• Contact Center devices real time performance monitoring

• Events and Alarms along with root cause analysis

• Contact Center device Dashboards - Prebuilt and custom

• Threshold, Syslog, Correlation and System Rules - Prebuilt and custom

• Multi-tenancy and logged-in agent licensing information

The Analysis Manager functionality integrated with the Unified Communications Manager Real-Time Monitoring Tool (RTMT) is provided as the client-side tool to collect diagnostic information from this diagnostic framework.

Using the Analysis Manager, the administrator connects to one or more Unified Communications devices to set trace levels, collect trace and log files, and gather platform and application configuration data as well as version and license information. The Analysis Manager is the one tool that allows administrators to collect diagnostic information from all Cisco Unified Communications applications and devices.

The Analysis Manager offers local user and domain security for authentication and secure HTTP to protect data exchanged by it and the diagnostic framework.

The Web Service Manager supports all diagnostic (health and status) requests from the Analysis Manager. The Analysis Manager is part of UCM RTMT tool. It provides users an interface for collecting health and status information for all devices in its network topology. If Unified CVP is configured as a part of the solution, you can leverage the WSM through the Analysis Manager to collect diagnostic details, such as server map, version information, licenses, configuration, components, logs, traces, performance factors, platform information for each CVP Device on a component and subcomponent level. You can set or reset debug levels using the Analysis Manager on a component and subcomponent level.

A new user with the wsmadmin username is created during installation with the same password as the Operations Console Server administrator user. Use wsmadmin to control access to the diagnostic portal services.

In addition to the Analysis Manager, a command line interface-Unified System CLI tool-is available that allows a client to access the diagnostic framework on any Unified Communications server. The Unified System CLI can be accessed without a remote desktop.

When an issue arises in your solution, use the System CLI tool to collect data for review by Cisco engineers. For example, you can use the System CLI if you suspect a call is handled incorrectly. In this case, you can use the show tech-support command to collect data and send the data to Cisco support.

Unified System CLI has the following features:

• Is automatically installed on all Unified CVP Servers as part of the infrastructure. No additional installation is required on any Unified CVP server.

• Automatically retrieves your entire solution topology from the Operations Console on any Unified CVP server with the System mode.

• Uses a consistent command across the solution.

• Can be executed as a Windows scheduled job.

The following figure shows the high-level commands for the Unified System CLI and shows the interaction of devices and Unified Cisco products.

Unified System CLI runs at a low priority; it uses idle CPU time on the system. It should not affect call processing even if executed on a system running under load.

The response time from the given CLI command varies depending on the load of the system and the server response time. The response time when there is no running load should be below 5 seconds for each server for operations, such as show version, show license, show debug, and show perf. The response time when there is no running load for show platform operation should be below 10 seconds for each server.

However, the response time cannot be determined for commands, such as show trace, show log, show sessions, show all, and show tech-support. The response for these commands can vary depending on the data being transferred by the server.

Analysis Manager and Unified System CLI access the Diagnostic Portal API. Both the Analysis Manager and the Unified System CLI have similar features, except for the differences shown in the table.

Unified CCE is managed using the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Unified CCE devices have a built-in SNMP agent infrastructure that supports SNMP v1, v2c, and v3 and it exposes instrumentation defined by the CISCO-CONTACT-CENTER-APPS-MIB. This MIB provides configuration, discovery, and health instrumentation that you can monitor with standard SNMP management stations. Unified CCE provides a rich set of SNMP notifications that alerts administrators of any faults in the system. Unified CCE also provides a standard syslog event feed (conforming to RFC 3164) if you need a more verbose set of events.

Unified CVP and Unified Intelligence Center support SNMP v2 and v3.

Cisco Finesse and SocialMiner only support SNMP from the VOS platform. You cannot use SNMP directly from the Cisco Finesse and SocialMiner applications.

You can use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) station to monitor the solution deployment status.

Unified CCE has a built-in web-based (REST-like) interface for diagnostics called the Diagnostic Framework, which is resident on every Unified CCE server.

Supporting and maintaining an enterprise solution requires many steps and procedures. Depending on the customer environment, the support procedures vary. System performance monitoring is one procedure that helps maintain the system. This section provides a guide for monitoring Unified CCE to ensure that the system is performing within system tolerances. System monitoring is especially critical for customers as they expand or upgrade their system. Monitor the system during times of heavy activity.

The following system components are critical to monitor:

• CPU

• Memory

• Disk

• Network

The following table highlights some of the important counters for the critical system components, along with their threshold values:

In general, the 95th percentile for your busy hour traffic should not exceed these thresholds.

Note

These performance counters for CPU, memory, disk, and network are applicable to all Windows-based applications within the deployment. The sample rate is 15 seconds. For more information on monitoring your VMs, see Cisco Collaboration Virtualization at http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/cisco-collaboration-virtualization.html.

When a call arrives at the Ingress Gateway, Cisco IOS assigns that call a 36-digit hexadecimal Global Unique Identifier (GUID), which identifies the call. The contact center carries that GUID through all of the components that the call encounters, as follows:

• Ingress gateway—Shown in Cisco IOS log files.

• Voice Browser—Shown in Cisco IOS and Cisco VVB log files.

• Unified CVP components—Shown in Unified CVP log files.

• Unified CCE—Shown in the Extended Call Context (ECC) variable user.media.id and stored with all Termination Call Detail (TCD) and Route Call Detail (RCD) records.

• Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) servers—Shown in logs as the logging tag.

• Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM)—Appears in the detailed logs.

With proper levels of logging enabled, you can trace a call through all these components.