Table Of Contents
Cisco Contact Center Services and Support
Data Sheet
Cisco Computer Telephony Integration Option
Today's contact center is about more than just handling inbound telephone calls—it is about fully integrated, multi-channel customer interaction. The Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise Edition and Cisco UnifiedContact Center Enterprise Edition solutions enable your business to implement a single solution to transparently blend multiple communication channels, including voice, Web, and e-mail. This offers your customers the choice of interacting with your contact center via telephone, Web callback, voice over IP (VoIP), text chat, or e-mail. To provide these alternatives to customers, CiscoUnified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise offer Cisco Web Collaboration Option, Cisco E-Mail Manager Option, Cisco Outbound Option, and Cisco Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Option as tightly integrated components.
The Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Editions are strategic platforms that enable customers to move into the next phase of customer contact—beyond today's contact center to a Customer Interaction Network. The Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based customer service infrastructure that comprises a continuously evolving suite of innovative, multi-channel services and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. These services and applications provide enhanced responsiveness and streamlined customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving your business a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction.
Cisco CTI Option Overview
Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise enable companies to deploy a complete network-to-desktop CTI strategy, including comprehensive functionality at the agent's workstation. These contact center solutions deliver a uniquely rich set of data to business applications, providing enterprise-wide call-event and customer-profile information to a targeted agent's desktop. This comprehensive CTI strategy enables the full utilization of corporate data in support of business rules and objectives at the point of customer contact.
Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise enable companies to more effectively utilize their corporate resources by taking advantage of information collected from the Internet, carrier networks, automatic call distributors (ACDs), interactive voice response (IVR) systems, Web servers, e-mail servers, databases, and other applications. Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise set a new standard for true enterprise CTI by unifying contact center systems from the network to the desktop—and across the enterprise—with minimal custom development or systems integration, enabling an organization to implement CTI quickly and cost-effectively.
Features and Benefits
Advanced computer telephony connections that deliver rich CTI data—Cisco CTI Option provides a uniquely rich data set to the desktop through advanced computer telephony connections among the system and carrier networks, ACDs, IVRs, and Web and e-mail servers. Information from these disparate resources is normalized by the ICM and Unified Contact Center system and then used in triggering integrated desktop telephony applications such as screen pops and voice and data transfers. Data elements can include dialed number, calling line ID (CLID), and customer entered digits (CED); information submitted on a Web form; and information extracted from databases or created as a result of contact routing, voice processing, and agent transactions. Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Unified Contact Center Enterprise route call-event and call-detail information to a targeted desktop when and where the contact is delivered.
Screen pop—One of the most important aspects of a CTI implementation is the ability to provide caller data to the agent's application at the desktop. This is commonly referred to as a screen pop. To achieve the screen pop, information about the call and the caller is gathered from the network and provided to the CTI application. This information is provided along with information from the IVR to the desktop application, which looks up the customer's information and delivers the appropriate customer record screen to the agent's PC. A screen pop enables contact center agents to handle calls more quickly (agents are not required to query the customer for basic information), and provide better service (customers are not required to restate information that they may have already provided to an IVR). The screen pop information is also available to any agent who may subsequently join the call, for example, via a transfer or conference operation.
Pre-route indications—Database lookups, particularly data-mining operations in which multiple records are queried, are time consuming. The system delivers pre-route indications to a CTI client, enabling these database operations to take place before a contact arrives at a contact center and permitting complex data-mining results to be delivered to the desktop before contact arrival. When the system returns a route destination to the network, it simultaneously passes the customer-profile data to the CTI client. While the contact is still in the network, the client delivers appropriate database information to the agent desktop. As a result, screen pops occur when they are most useful—on or before the first ring of the agent's phone.
Cisco Post-Routing® function—Through the Cisco Post-Routing function, Cisco CTI Option lets clients benefit from the same powerful routing logic that the system delivers during the Cisco Pre-Routing® application. This capability allows contact center managers to control contact flow throughout the life of each customer interaction, consistently providing the best possible contact treatment. When transfers are necessary, the system finds the best resource within the enterprise, alleviating agents of that responsibility.
Coordinated voice and data transfer across the enterprise—Cisco CTI Option delivers benefits to both the customer and the contact center—and these benefits do not stop when the first agent receives the contact. If the contact is subsequently transferred to another agent, the CTI Option provides coordinated voice and data transfer by sending customer-profile data along with the contact. The system maintains the customer state and data, even across heterogeneous equipment, throughout the life of a contact—from agent to agent and site to site.
Distributed fault tolerance—Cisco CTI Option inherently possesses distributed fault tolerance. If a connection fails, client links are automatically established to a redundant server. The contact's history and any updates remain in effect if the client connection fails and is reestablished.
Choice at the desktop—Cisco CTI Option preserves investments made in traditional desktop systems by easily integrating with existing environments. These flexible solutions require no intrusive changes to traditional systems and support operations ranging from fewer than 25 to thousands of agents working on a variety of desktops.
Server integration—The Cisco CTI Option enables server integration to provide a high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant, server-based solution for deploying CTI applications—providing for a single point of integration for third-party applications, including CRM systems, data mining, and workflow solutions. System configuration information is managed at the server level, simplifying customization, updates, and maintenance. Thin-client and browser-based applications that do not require Cisco software on the desktop can easily be developed and deployed in this configuration. With all ACD-specific logic residing at the server level within the Cisco CTI Option, Cisco next-generation server integration also eliminates the need for CTI applications to account for switch-specific behavior.
Desktop integration—In addition to server integration, Cisco offers a range of desktop CTI products to meet the varied needs of its customers. Cisco CTI offerings provide customers a choice, spanning from out-of-the-box CTI solutions to pre-integrated solutions with leading CRM vendors, to desktop tools that allow for fully customized CTI implementations. Any of the desktop solutions used will take advantage of the fault-tolerant, carrier-class architecture of the Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise and Unified Contact Center Enterprise.
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Packaged, configurable agent soft phone—To address the need for contact centers to deploy simplified CTI solutions, Cisco offers an out-of-the-box CTI solution that provides soft phone capabilities such as call answer, hold, conference, and transfer, allowing agents to control traditional telephony functions from their PCs rather than traditional handset telephones. The soft phone desktop component requires minimum screen real estate and enables agents to customize functionality to individual needs. The soft phone also has the ability to be configured to match the needs of each contact center without the need for full customization by enabling an administrator to easily adjust the functionality required by the contact center agents to perform their tasks efficiently and effectively.
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Cisco CTI toolkit supports a Java version of the API for customers who wish to develop platform independent client applications to CTI. Cisco CTI Toolkit continues to support C++ and C++/COM CIL APIs as well as an ActiveX Control Toolkit for custom CTI client integration.
CTI support for Cisco Outbound Option—The Cisco CTI Option supports the Cisco Outbound Option for agents in blended mode—these agents are able to switch between receipt of inbound and outbound calls on a call-by-call basis—by delivering customer information to the agent either prior to an outbound call or as an inbound call is received.
Silent monitoring with Cisco Unified Contact Center —Silent monitor provides a contact center supervisor with a means to listen in on agent calls in a Cisco Unified Contact Center environment. Supervisors can send silent monitor requests to agent desktops with or without the agent being aware of any monitoring activity. Voice packets sent to and received by the monitored agent's IP phone are captured from the network and sent to the supervisor desktop. At the supervisor desktop, these voice packets are decoded and played on the supervisor's system sound card.
Cisco Contact Center Services and Support
Cisco Contact Center services and support reduce the cost, time, and complexity of implementing a contact center. Cisco and its partners have designed and deployed some of today's largest and most complex contact centers—meaning that they understand how to integrate a contact center solution into your network infrastructure, a solution that will help you more quickly realize business results and gain a competitive advantage.
Based on this extensive experience, Cisco has set industry standards with a services blueprint that defines critical service requirements to accelerate your success with Cisco Contact Center solutions. Cisco and partner service programs map to this services blueprint, providing you a flexible suite of collaborative offerings that help you plan, design, implement, operate, and grow a contact center solution.
Through these services, your organization benefits from the experience gained by Cisco and its partners. Taking advantage of this valuable experience, you can create and maintain a resilient solution that will meet your business needs today—and in the future.
Summary
The CTI capabilities of Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise Edition and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Edition are essential for companies that want to take advantage of enterprise-wide data to obtain maximum customer service levels. The ability of the system to deliver accurate customer-profile and contact center information to the desktop, perform agent-to-agent transfer of call-detail information across multiple sites, and allow selection of best-of-class desktop solutions can enable businesses to achieve higher levels of contact center efficiency and customer satisfaction—continuing the evolution toward a true Customer Interaction Network.