Cisco Contact Center Enterprise 12.6 Data Sheet

Digital channels integration with CCE via Webex Connect

Customers are increasingly using digital channels and expect to reach business as easily as they reach friends and family. Businesses need to make richer connections with their customers through the channel of their choice, which means going beyond traditional channels such as voice to enable communications on digital channels like SMS, Live Chat, Email, WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger, in-app messaging.

The Webex Connect-powered digital channels enable businesses to deliver customer experiences across the entire lifecycle, by incorporating artificial intelligence, experience management, omnichannel communications, and programmability for customization. With this integration, Contact Center Enterprise customers can now quickly set up digital and social communication channels.

The Webex Connect platform provides easy to use flow builder capabilities to automate customer interactions which can start with self-service and, when required, be escalated to agents. Agent escalation from Webex Connect to CCE blended agents is built into the solution and offers a blended routing experience.

Webex Connect also includes a Bot Builder – a Natural Language Processing (NLP)/ Natural Language Understanding (NLU)-based bot building tool which integrates into business logic via a Q&A bot or a Task Bot.

SMS, Chat and Email channels can be ordered as part of Premium agent seat license, there would be additional charges on SMS usage.

Reporting on Agent and Queue statistics will be using the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center reports.

CCE continues to support Enterprise Email and Chat (ECE) although both ECE and Webex Connect cannot be deployed simultaneously in the same solution.

Virtual Agent Voice - CX

Virtual Agent–Voice CX leverages the Google Dialogflow CX service that allows the design of virtual voice agents and creating and connecting complex IVR call flows.

Using this feature, multiple agents can be created under the same Project ID and can be accessed and managed for different lines of business with a single Google account.

Virtual Agent Voice (CX) - Transcription

Virtual Agent Voice – CX Transcription provides the ability to obtain transcription for an entire IVR call in order to comprehend key customer requirements and the overall IVR call experience.

With the IVR transcript feature, as soon as an agent accepts a call, he or she can view the entire transcript to better comprehend the call's context and the end user needs.

Virtual Agent Voice – CX distributed application flow

Virtual Agent Voice – distributed application flow enables the seamless transfer of application flow from a cloud AI application to a core IVR application and vice versa to satisfy business logic requirements.

If business logic is distributed between an IVR application, where certain logic must be processed, and an AI application, and switching is required between these applications back and forth, feature is quite valuable.

Also, it is very useful when compliance requirements dictate that certain infrastructure must be maintained by the core IVR application, while other sections can be managed by the AI application.

Agent Answers and Call Transcripts

Unified CCE leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to provide services that assist agents.

These Contact Center AI services are available for the agents handling voice calls through the Agent Answers gadget and the Call Transcript gadget in the Cisco Finesse desktop.

The Agent Answers gadget displays relevant suggestions and recommendations fetched from the customer uploaded knowledge base in real time based on the interaction between agent and the caller. Agent Answers enhances the customer experience by providing timely suggestions and improves the ability of the agent to address customer issues more effectively.

The Call Transcript gadget dynamically converts the ongoing voice conversation to text and presents the text to an agent for real-time viewing and reference. Version 12.6(2) includes support for the Virtual Agent transcript in addition to the real-time transcript.

Simplified Upgrade using Orchestration

The Contact Center Enterprise Orchestration feature provides partners and administrators an option to automatically download and simplify the installation and rollback of software updates including Microsoft patches.

Integration of Graceful Shutdown feature within Orchestration framework ensures that the software updates are updated with minimal downtime.

The Orchestration framework is built within the Cloud Connect server that connects to the Cisco hosted cloud software repository.

Graceful Shutdown

Graceful shutdown allows an administrator or partner to perform firmware upgrades, apply security patches, and apply Engineering Specials (ES) without the need for a maintenance window.

With this feature, actively used processes are brought down while the backup processes take over, with minimal impact to the contact center day-to-day (Day 2) operations.

From an agent desktop perspective, the system automatically shifts the desktop from Side-A to Side-B within few seconds, with a clear countdown alert for agent. This process is done in batches of agents for maximum efficiency.

AppDynamics native integration with CCE

For Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise solution, it is important to have continuous and seamless monitoring of the deployed solution and automated alerting when anomalies are detected.

AppDynamics provides a solution for application performance monitoring that helps to achieve the following:

For ordering and setting up AppDynamics On-Premises or SAAS controller, please contact the AppDynamics sales team at appd_ucce_sales@cisco.com.

Agent Device Selection

Contact Center Enterprise enables agents to share an extension across multiple devices. This is especially useful for remote agents who may now use a mix of soft phones as well as hard phones for their contact center CTI operations.

If the agent or supervisor has one or more devices using the same extension, a list of devices (up to 5 devices) is displayed at the time of signing in into Finesse. The agent can select which out of them will be used as the 'active' device (for desktop call-handling operations) during this session.

Multi-Tab Gadgets (supported with Cisco Answers)

Finesse desktop now supports multiple gadgets accessed via tabs, from within a single, custom desktop gadget called Multi-Tab gadget. Multi-Tab gadget allows rendering more gadgets in a single desktop view, thus presenting more information in a concise and readily accessible manner. Gadget tabs can be re-arranged within Multi-Tab gadget. Call Control gadget can be hosted as a tab within Multi-Tab gadget. Height of gadgets within Multi-Tab gadget can configure as dynamically adjusting or always maximized view. Gadgets can be made to appear/hide based on desktop context, using APIs. Notifications can be made to appear or hide to control user attention, using APIs. This feature is available for Agents and Supervisors.

Edge Chromium Browser Support

This release supports Edge Chromium (Microsoft Edge v79 and later).

Support for 36,000 agents

A 24,000-agent reference design can be modified to scale up to 36,000 agents. This is accomplished by adding more peripheral VMs and peripheral gateways to the deployment and optimizing specific configuration limits.

ECE Scale

ECE now supports up to 2500 concurrent Agents with 12.6.(1) ES3 and an updated OVA.

ECE support for Polish and Czech

Support for Polish and Czech languages have been added to the ECE User Interface.

ECE Windows 2019 and SQL Server 2019 support

ECE 12.6 now supports Windows 2019 and SQL Server 2019 exclusively. For customers not wishing to upgrade their ECE component to Windows and SQL Server 2019, they have the option to use the previous version (ECE 12.5) with UCCE 12.6.

VPN-less Finesse (agent and supervisor desktops)

This feature provides the flexibility for agents and supervisors to access the Finesse desktop from remote locations through the Internet without requiring VPN connectivity to the Enterprise data center. To enable this feature, a reverse-proxy pair must be deployed in the DMZ.

Media access remains unchanged in reverse-proxy deployments. To connect to the media, agents and supervisors can use Cisco Jabber over MRA or the Mobile Agent capability of Contact Center Enterprise with a PSTN or mobile endpoint.

To use VPN-less access to Finesse desktop, Finesse, IdS, and CUIC needs to be upgraded to Release 12.6(1) ES03 or above. If Unified CCE 12.6(1) is being used, Live Data needs to be upgraded to 12.6(1) ES03 or above.

As part of 12.6.2 Release, the VPN-less Finesse deployment has been made easier with the support of a new installer, that has the following features:

Support for Webex Workforce Optimization (WFO) for Unified CCE and Packaged CCE

Webex Workforce Optimization includes quality management, workforce management and analytics solutions that empower contact centers of all sizes to optimize agent performance and provides true insight into the voice of the customer.

Workforce management

Workforce Management allows contact centers to manage their human capital resources. Managers can develop schedules for multiple sites, manage critical data and key performance indicators (KPIs), and manage real-time adherence of agents to their schedules. WFM solution empowers contact center personnel to more easily and accurately forecast for the unexpected, proactively analyze and adjust for daily realities, and make smarter decisions to manage critical business resources to optimize service levels. All features provided on the slide are available in the Advanced WFM. In addition, WFM:

Quality management

Quality Management is an evaluation solution for optimizing agent performance that is designed to improve the customer experience. It is a simple and cost-effective solution for contact centers that value speed, scale, flexibility, and/or reliability in their solutions. Quality Management helps monitor and measure the contact center's contribution to overall business objectives:

WFO Analytics

Every customer conversation is valuable and contains unique insights. Identifying relevant information, determining its importance, and having the ability to act on the insights is critical to an organization. WFO Analytics allows organizations to make better, faster, and more consistent data-driven decisions to protect and grow their business by discovering the true nature of 100% of conversations. All features provided on the slide are available in the WFO Analytics. In addition, WFO Analytics provides:

For more details on Webex WFO and the supported features, please refer to Webex WFO Datasheet: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/contact-center/unified-contact-center-express/datasheet-c78-743932.html.

SMS and Email Survey after Voice

With Webex Experience Management, contact centers can provide feedback from customers to agents and supervisors.

This feature is extended to SMS and email. This allows customers to participate in the survey using the links sent over SMS or email. The survey results help the agents and the supervisors to offer more personalized and contextual experience to the customers.

Password Hashing

This release includes a key security update which allows more secure hashing for agent and supervisor passwords in the non-SSO mode.

Drop Participants from Conference

The release allows an agent or a supervisor, who is the participant in a conference call, to drop other agents, supervisors, or non-agents from the conference call.

VAD Optimization

Virtual Voice Browser (VVB) has an advanced VAD feature (Voice Activity Detection) to detect speech signal and truncate noise packets from beginning or end of speech signal. This enhances overall customer experience for on-prem or cloud interactions.

CCB EWT Timer

Expected wait timer for courtesy call back feature has been enhanced to 4 hours, providing opportunity for end customers to continue to wait in queue for longer durations without any disconnection.

Dynamic releases

Rel 12.6 introduces a new type of release called Dynamic Release catering to the needs of customers who prefer faster feature adoption and would like to stay current with latest updates from Cisco with new features.

New features introduced in Rel 12.6 such as Simplified patch upgrades through automated notification, orchestrated patch application and minimal downtime would enable the customers to seamlessly keep their contact center on that latest release with minimal downtime.

The existing approach of long-term releases with only bug fix support, catering to customers who prefer infrequent upgrade cycles, would continue as is (e.g., Rel 12.5).

Cloud Connect platform

This infrastructure enables customers to add complementary cloud-based services to provide enhanced capabilities to on-premises systems through a common data format and provides the ability to Orchestrate the upgrade of CCE solution by downloading software updates from Cisco hosted Cloud repository.

Customer Virtual Assistant

Bring conversational self-service capabilities to enterprises by integrating cloud-based speech engines such as Google Dialogflow to CVP, VVB.

Extensible next-generation unified administration for PCCE with UX refresh

Render external websites and embed containerized gadgets for third-party integrations in the PCCE unified admin (for example, admin gadgets for S+ partner applications).

Multi-version upgrade support for PCCE

Large enterprises (4000-12,000 workers) that have adopted Packaged CCE are able to upgrade their solution in a phased manner, component by component, much like UCCE.

Smart Licensing

Cisco’s simplified, cloud-based license management system takes away the traditional administrative overhead of applying for licenses and moving them between systems and brings greater transparency with respect to entitlements versus usage. From the current release onward, customers will need to purchase CCE through a Smart License. This applies to both perpetual and Flex licenses.

Finesse user experience enhancements

Give more power to the agents. Now you can drag and drop Finesse gadgets and resize and rearrange the same as per agent-specific layouts.

Agents can update call variables inline from their desktops, thereby aligning the call context directly at the source.

Agents and supervisors can now quickly get to their tasks by using shortcut keys.

Finesse failover improvement makes the system highly available much faster than before.

Supervisors can quickly search and retrieve an agent in the Team Performance gadget.

The improved Finesse layout configuration UX makes layout management by administrators easier and less error prone.

The contact limit for Phonebook has been increased to 6000 contacts.

As part of 12.6.2 Release, a new floating popup with auto disappear has been introduced as a new alert capability. It shall be used to inform agents about incoming messages from various media channels. Also, via notification icon on the navigation pane, users are alerted about media notifications, that have arrived.

Security enhancements

Continuous security hardening protects sensitive customer and contact center user information and keeps infrastructure up to date against ongoing vulnerabilities.

Scaled outbound capacities with high availability

Extend outreach capabilities for marketing, collections-based campaigns, as well as one-on-one relationship management conversations.

2 times increase in outbound calls per second (to 240 cps system-wide)

2.5 times increase in simultaneous active campaigns (to 1500)

2 times increase in total supported dialer ports (to 12,000 system-wide)

Shared line between endpoints

Allow an agent to share an extension with multiple devices, thereby enhancing agent mobility between home and office.

Surveys via Webex Experience Management

Integrate the voice of the customer to empower agents and supervisors and enable them to provide personalized customer experience during voice conversations. For voice call the surveys can be both inline after the call or deferred (SMS/Email) survey.

Post Chat and Email inline survey is supported as well.

Solution features

Next-generation unified administration for PCCE

A unified admin console on a single pane of glass can manage the end-to-end solution, including the PCCE system and partner applications.

For IT professionals, the Cisco Finesse application offers a thin-client agent desktop that integrates smoothly with the Cisco Collaboration portfolio. It is standards-compliant and offers low cost of customization of the agent and supervisor desktops.

The Cisco Finesse API allows companies to develop custom Cisco Finesse desktop capabilities tailored to meet the specific needs of their contact center operations. The Cisco Finesse API provides this feature through REST APIs and JavaScript libraries that simplify the development and integration of value-added applications and reduce the need for detailed desktop development expertise.

Single sign-on

The solution simplifies login and password management for agents and supervisors by allowing just one login for the Cisco Finesse desktop and associated gadgets. All SAML.

2.0 compatible IdPs single sign-on is supported for the maximum of 24,000 concurrent agents in PCCE.

Cisco Outbound Option

The Cisco Outbound Option, with its combination of outbound dialing modes, complements the powerful inbound call-handling capability of the CCE product line. You can build campaigns to use predictive, progressive, or preview dialing, which is integrated with inbound calls and compliant with contact center service levels, to offer a powerful blended solution. You can allocate agents to handle only inbound, only outbound, or both inbound and outbound contacts, offering an effective way to increase resource use in a contact center. Call-Progress Analysis (CPA; also known as answering machine detection) is enabled for the outbound dialer when using Cisco Unified Border Element. Outbound reports include Performance Monitoring (PerfMon) counters and personal call-back improvements for better agent usage.

Agent greeting

You can play a configurable, automated agent greeting to callers, standardizing the caller experience. The greeting helps keep the agent voices fresh because they do not have to repeat the same greeting on every call.

Agent whisper

Customers can play a configurable announcement to an agent right before the caller is connected, providing information about the type of call being delivered (for example, sales or tech support) and other guidance. Agents get information about the caller through their headset, speeding problem handling and improving first-call resolution.

Remote-agent support

Remote-agent support extends the contact center by providing 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 telephone line. The CCE product line provides identical user interfaces and feature functions to agents, regardless of location.

Cisco Unified Mobile Agent allows agents to choose their destination phone number during login time, and to change the number as often as they want, giving the contact center the flexibility to adapt to a fast-moving mobile workforce. With work-at-home programs, agents can be given location flexibility while reducing the contact center’s startup costs. This capability also allows agents to be on any phone device on any third- party switch infrastructure.

Extension Mobility (cross-cluster)

This Cisco Unified Communications Manager feature, supported by CCE, allows agents to temporarily access their Cisco unified IP phone configuration, such as line appearances, services, and speed dials, from other Cisco unified IP phones.

Mobile agent call-by-call mode

Remote agents consume system resources (such as gateway ports and recording channels) only when actively on a call.

Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent

Finesse IP Phone Agent allows agents to use their Cisco IP phone to perform common agent tasks such as setting their state (for example, ready or not ready) and handling customer calls without the need of a desktop.

Multitenancy with departments

Customers with multiple Lines of Business (LOBs) or departments can easily share the same instance of Unified CCE or Packaged CCE using the Departments feature. This feature allows you to assign resources, including agents, skill groups, call types, and precision queues, by LOB or department. When resources are assigned to a LOB or department, only the supervisor or manager of that LOB or department can view and manage those resources.

In Unified CCE, you can manage departments through the Cisco Unified Contact Center Management Portal (Unified CCMP). In Packaged CCE, the native web administration allows management of departments.

Along with configuration, scripting access is also segmented when using Internet Script Editor. Finally, using the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center Collections feature, you can segment reporting to match departments.

System capabilities

Open systems

The CCE product line 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, COM, and .NET interfaces for CTI applications, can integrate with existing contact center solutions, preserving investments in traditional systems and providing a platform for future applications.

Operating systems

The CCE product line supports Windows Server 2016, SQL Server 2017 (Windows Server 2019 and SQL Server 2019 for ECE, CCMP/CCDM), and VMware ESXi 7.0 and 6.7.

Distributed fault tolerance

From the network to the desktop, all components and external application links provide carrier-class, distributed fault tolerance at both the hardware and software levels, with real-time application failover capabilities. Self-diagnostics and self-healing features allow the system to automatically take advantage of redundant components when required; the system is resilient to hardware component failures, communications network failures, and asynchronous software errors.

Network management

CCE product line software provides a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface for integration into centralized network management systems. It also provides integration into a broader unified communications management infrastructure, bundled with Cisco Unified Communications Manager. It provides new levels of availability and manageability during deployments and upgrades, as well as during normal contact center operations.

Security

The CCE product line supports the latest in security and data integrity features and solutions to reduce attack surfaces and system vulnerability. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is available on all web-based applications, and Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2) and IP Security (IPsec) support is available for sockets-based communications to secure data in transit across trusted and untrusted networks.

IPv6 dual mode

The CCE product line supports IPv6 endpoints in dual-network mode, enabling easier migration from IPv4.

Product functions

Routing functions

Precision routing sends the contact to the best available resource, based on information about the caller and the attributes of the agent. By delivering the contact effectively, companies can reduce overall handle time, decrease the need for multiple transfers, and increase customer satisfaction with the experience. Precision routing is supported for all contact channels, including voice, video, web, chat, and email.

Cisco pre-routing and post-routing functions

The Cisco pre-routing function makes routing decisions for each call while it is still in the carrier's network, enabling the Cisco platform to effectively segment customers, balance calls across the enterprise, and deliver each contact to the best enterprise resource the first time. The Cisco post-routing function provides the intelligent distribution of contacts already connected to a peripheral in your network, whether it is an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), PBX, IVR, web, or email server. When a contact requires redirection, Cisco Unified CCE applies business logic, instructing the peripheral to send the contact to the best available enterprise resource.

Customer profile routing

The CCE product line extends the sources of data available for making contact routing decisions and for populating agent desktop applications. For instance, you can perform a lookup in your customer database during routing to guide its decisions. You can also use information from CRM applications to match customers with agents and expand the data available to screen-pop applications.

Wherever an agent is based, the system delivers context-call event and customer- profile data as a contact arrives, allowing the agent or application to personalize service and help maximize efficiency.

Agent request API

The agent request API enables businesses to add voice callback as a feature to their custom-developed applications for the web and for mobile applications. Businesses can present callback as one of the ways or channels their customers can contact them, allowing customers to choose the channel of communication that works best for them.

Outbound campaign management API

This API allows for more precise control over contact center outbound calling campaigns.

Reporting

The CCE product line provides real-time and historical data necessary for mission- critical contact center reporting across all media types. The solution provides accurate and timely reports on contact center activity, helping managers make informed decisions regarding staffing levels and contact handling procedures.

Reporting is provided by the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, which offers numerous report templates intended to meet common reporting needs. With the availability of the underlying data model and schema, you can easily develop custom reports to extend the solution to meet specific reporting needs. Furthermore, the CCE product line allows for the export of reporting data to external data warehouse environments for extended storage and advanced analytics.

The Live Data feature provides a new real-time architecture with significant real-time refresh-rate improvements with actionable, real-time contact center information.

Reports available from Cisco Unified Intelligence Center and reporting gadgets available on the Cisco Finesse desktop take advantage of this next-generation architecture.

Task routing

This feature coordinates an agent's ability to work on multiple tasks from various channels while allowing the agent to be interrupted with high-priority tasks as required. For instance, an agent who is assisting a customer using text chat could handle another chat request at the same time, increasing the agent's productivity. Agents also can be sent a task of a different channel type from their active task. For example, an agent responding to a customer's email message can be sent a voice call or a back-office task, allowing the agent to handle the real-time voice call and then return to the email message. In this way, you can optimize your agents' activities, helping ensure the highest level of customer service with the resources available.

Task Routing API

This API enables new types of interactions—such as third-party applications, videos, texts, and events from the Internet of Things (IoT)—to be routed to the contact center. The Task Routing API also allows precision routing capabilities to be applied to non- voice interactions.

Scalability

Cisco Packaged CCE supports configurations of up to 12,000 agents. Consult the solution design guide for additional configuration limits for scaling.

Packaged CCE support for multisite (global) deployment

Packaged CCE supports up to 12 peripheral-gateway Unified Communications Manager pairs, enabling a broader range of geographic and segmentation deployment options.

Packaged CCE support for the application gateway

Packaged CCE can use the application gateway to obtain data from outside applications, enhancing its ability to support unique business processes and requirements.

Reduced integration costs

Until now, businesses had to integrate numerous products from different vendors, an expensive task that postponed service introduction. Cisco Packaged CCE provides inbound and outbound voice and video, IVR, and web interaction. In addition, the solution supports best-in-class contact center applications such as CRM, workforce management, recording and monitoring, and wallboards. By consolidating all contact center functions into a single platform, Cisco Packaged CCE reduces capital expenditures and integration expenses while accelerating time to market for a complete contact center solution.

Cisco Unified Computing System^™ (Cisco UCS^®), spec- based hardware support

Cisco UCS C240 M5 Rack Servers are supported. Packaged CCE also supports third- party hardware with specification-based configuration.

System inventory and notification

Taking advantage of the fixed deployment model of Packaged CCE, the system automatically generates a visual representation of a Packaged CCE deployment. It is a dashboard of administrative information, including name, IP address, and a single-pane- of-glass window that includes end-to-end solution administration such as self-service with Cisco Unified CVP and VVB configurations, desktop with Finesse (reason codes, etc.), multichannel with ECE, etc. It also serves as a level-one dashboard, providing visual notifications of errors or warnings of configuration or runtime problems through periodic auto-scans, keeping track of system health and reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).

Management

Packaged CCE uses built-in web administration gadgets and capabilities to manage the solution. Specific capabilities include system inventory, server status and notifications, automated installation and configuration, built-in status rules, built-in departments, built-in roles, one-click log collection, simplified trace setting, web gadgets to add/remove/update configuration and to perform agent reskilling, and multi-edit capabilities. REST APIs for these and other operations are exposed so that customers and partners can tailor them to their specific needs.

Scalability

Cisco Unified CCE scales from small, single-site deployments of tens of agents up to 36,000 agents for large enterprise and hosted, distributed deployments. Because the Cisco Unified CCE architecture is software-based, the system scales easily without causing obsolescence of any components. Cisco Unified CCE is designed to accommodate changing contact center environments.

Contact Director

The Contact Director deployment model uses contact-sharing technology to enable customers who have up to three Cisco Unified CCE systems to distribute calls across those systems, thus increasing overall agent and call-handling capacity. Contact sharing uses live data to learn about current conditions at those sites and can base routing decisions on factors such as number of calls in queue, agent availability, average handle time, or custom calculations.

Management

The Cisco Unified Contact Center Management Portal (CCMP) provides a simple-to-use web-based user interface to streamline the day-to-day provisioning and configuration operations that contact center managers, team leads, or administrators perform, such as moves, adds, or modifications of phones, agents, skill groups, and teams, and other common contact center administrative functions. Agents with appropriate permission are also provided a unique interface on the Cisco Unified CCMP on which they can make changes to their profile and work assignment. The unified configuration of the management portal is designed to simplify administration of both the applicable IP- based contact center elements and the Cisco Unified Communications Manager components. The Cisco Unified CCMP is a partitioned system that can support multiple business units with complete autonomy, and it offers hierarchical administration to support users at multiple levels within the business and specific roles and responsibilities. Finally, to help administrators and managers keep track of contact center modifications, it provides audit-trail reports detailing all configuration changes and usage of the management portal.

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