Cisco Unified Contact Center
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 automatic call distributor (ACD) functionality with IP telephony in a unified solution, enabling you to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure.
Unified CCE provides the following services:
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Segmentation of customers and monitoring of resource availability
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Delivery of each contact to the most appropriate resource anywhere in the enterprise
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Comprehensive customer profiles using contact-related data, such as dialed number and calling line ID
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Routing to the most appropriate resource to meet caller needs based on real-time conditions (such as agent skills, availability, and queue lengths)
Unified CCE enables 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 chooses.
Unified CCE is a distributed solution with no single-server implementation. Unified CCE employs multiple servers each with multiple software components. Deployment options are flexible with performance, capacity, and network topology driving the deployment design.
Unified CCE was derived from Unified ICME with the primary difference being that Unified CCE integrates only with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) IP PBX. All other major components of the Unified CCE solution are the same as the Unified ICM solution.
The Unified ICM platform is designed to route calls between various nodes in the TDM phone network. It is designed with an emphasis on reliability and flexibility. All processing in these components is message-based. The content of the message and the current state of the process determines the processing of each message. The messages are delivered to these components using the Unified ICM Message Delivery Service (MDS). MDS ensures that both processes are fed the exact same set of messages in the same order.
One of the most important concepts to understand about Unified CCE is its redundancy strategy. The components that contain centralized state are run in duplex. Two of these components work in lockstep to ensure redundancy and immediate recovery from a fault.
From a device standpoint, a typical Unified CCE deployment looks as follows:
There are four major components of a Unified CCE deployment: the Router, the Logger, the Peripheral Gateway (PG), and the Administration & Data Server. The basic function of each is as follows:
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Router—Make the routing decisions. The router selects a peripheral or agent to receive an inbound contact (voice call, email, chat, and so on).
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Logger—Store (and replicate) all configuration, real-time and historical data.
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Peripheral Gateway—Act as a gateway to a peripheral device, like an IP PBX or a Voice Response Unit (VRU), and a CTI gateway linking agent desktops.
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Administration & Data Server—A server implementation that provides configuration data (from the Logger), an interface for real-time data, and a platform for the historical data server (HDS). The Administration & Data Server also offers an interface for administrators to alter configuration and routing scripts (Script Editor, Internet Script Editor).
Note |
Unified CCE applications do not report their resource usage to monitoring solutions, like Cisco Prime Collaboration. The monitoring solution retrieves CPU and memory usage data directly from the Windows Server operating system. On multicore systems, Windows Server might report usage greater than 100% while the Unified CCE solution is running as usual. |
Unified CM Peripheral Support and CTI OS
Cisco Finesse replaces CTI OS for Unified CCE.
CTI OS is no longer supported with Unified CCE. However, CTI OS is supported with UCCE System PG and other TDM peripheral types.
The CTI OS server setup now has the option to select UCCE System instead of UCCE. The setup also validates whether the selected peripheral is configured, through the Peripheral Gateway Setup, as UCCE System peripheral or not.