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Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE)
The complete guide to managing UCCE environments: tips, tricks, best practices, and lessons learned
Gary Ford
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) integrates multiple components and can serve a wide spectrum of business requirements. In this book, Gary Ford, an experienced Cisco UCCE consultant brings together all the guidance you need to optimally configure and manage UCCE in any environment.
The author shares in-depth insights covering both the enterprise and hosted versions of UCCE. He presents an administrator’s view of how to perform key UCCE tasks and why they work as they do. He thoroughly addresses application configuration, agents, scripting, IVR, dial plans, UCM, error handling, reporting, metrics, and many other key topics.
You’ll find proven, standardized configuration examples that help eliminate errors and reduce downtime, step-by-step walkthroughs of several actual configurations, and thorough coverage of monitoring and troubleshooting UCCE systems.
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) is an indispensable resource to help you deploy and operate UCCE systems reliably and efficiently.
Gary Ford has spent more than 13 years designing, deploying, and maintaining Cisco telephony and contact center solutions together with several of the world’s largest systems integration companies, Cisco ATPs, and customers. He was first introduced to contact centers in 1997 while working for British Telecom (BT) as a test engineer tasked with integrating the GeoTel ICR platform into BT’s core telephony network. After Cisco acquired GeoTel, Ford’s role evolved to include broader Cisco contact center and unified communications consulting. He holds a bachelor’s of engineering degree in computer systems engineering, the status of Chartered Engineer, and several Cisco, Microsoft, and business-related professional qualifications.
· Understand the Cisco Unified Contact Center product portfolio and platform architecture
· Choose the right single-site, multi-site, or clustered deployment model for your environment
· Take a lifecycle services approach to UCCE deployment and application configuration-—including preparation, planning, design, and implementation
· Implement traditional, current-generation, and next-generation call routing
· Master the latest best practices for call flow scripting
· Understand UCCE’s nodes and distributed processes and build a clean system startup sequence
· Design, implement, and deliver unified CM/IP IVR solutions
· Set up and efficiently manage UCCE databases
· Make the most of UCCE’s reporting tools
· Create advanced applications with Data-Driven Routing
· Effectively maintain any UCCE deployment, including older versions
· Use a best-practice methodology for troubleshooting, and master valuable, little-known Cisco diagnostic tools
This IP communications book is part of the Cisco Press® Networking Technology Series. IP communications titles from Cisco Press help networking professionals understand voice and IP telephony technologies, plan and design converged networks, and implement network solutions for increased productivity.
Introduction
1. UCCE Overview
2. Platform Architecture
3. Deployment Models
4. Platform Operating Systems and Patching
5. Cisco UCCE Components and Roadmap
6. Core Platform Configuration Examples
7. Application Configuration
8. Agent Configuration
9. Call Scripting
10. Advanced Scripting
11. IVR
12. Dial Plans
13. Unified Communications Manager
14. Error Handling
15. Reporting
16. Platform Management
The contact center products offered here by Cisco show the well placed bet that the company has made on the continued growth of the Internet and the possibility, if not the certainty, that this will far exceed the growth of proprietary products that are not based on the Internet. The book has an alphabet soup of products within the call center suite. These tend to be based on industry wide standards, and the most important is the ability to use VoIP. The typically free nature of that at the client, especially for long distance calls, has made VoIP increasingly popular.
UCCE has impressive scalability. Chapter 3 ['Deployment Models'] describes how it can go from single site to multisite, where the latter might be for a large corporation with one data center and several remote sites that each have little or no colocated technical personnel to handle call center computing issues. The big attraction here for the company is the ability UCCE offers of centralised call processing, with concomitant savings in labour and overhead charges.
The Cisco Unified IP Interactive Voice Response [IVR] is built atop Java, which though owned by Oracle now, has widespread support amongst programmers. The text mentions that the IVR product can be readily extended by developers who code in Java; though this is not a programming book, and you need to look elsewhere in Cisco documentation for details on how to do this. Similarly in chapter 13 ['Data-Driven Routing'], the Application Gateway exposes a programming interface for outsiders to the call scripts to access their own applications.
There is some programming discussed within the text; in chapter 9 ['Call Flow Scripting']. Amusingly, there is an example of a possible antipattern of a script node that has an anding of several logical conditions. The author recommends using multiple IF nodes in sequence. Making for easier scrutiny and debugging and any future modification.
Overview
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE)
The complete guide to managing UCCE environments: tips, tricks, best practices, and lessons learned
Gary Ford
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) integrates multiple components and can serve a wide spectrum of business requirements. In this book, Gary Ford, an experienced Cisco UCCE consultant brings together all the ...