Over the past decade or two, the contact centre has taken up an increasingly central role in the planning and strategy of many businesses. From being viewed as a functional and perhaps peripheral part of operations, a means of processing customer interaction with factory-like efficiency, the contact centre has come to be viewed as a beating heart within an organisation, rather than an expendable limb.
Put simply, the contact centre is the crucible which fires relationships with customers. And in an age when businesses selling much the same products at much the same prices now compete fiercely on customer service, the ability to forge positive, strong bonds with customers has a direct relationship with profit and growth.
Given this importance, it is natural that businesses should want to equip their contact centre to optimise its impact. As with any critical business system, choosing the right contact solution has a direct bearing on the bottom line.
Why, then, should businesses settle for a narrow range of contact centre options? How likely are they to find the solution which meets their precise needs from brands offering a single off-the-shelf contact centre platform, often as a tag-on to a broader UC offering?
When choosing an ERP or productivity solution, businesses are spoilt for choice. Why should it not be the same in the contact centre?
Cisco believes modern businesses deserve the same level of choice with contact centre solutions. True to form for one of the world’s leading communications specialists catering for a huge and diverse customer base, Cisco offers a complete range of contact centre products intended to meet every need.
In this review, we will take a broad overview of the complete Cisco contact centre range, outlining the key features of each and the main differences. Before we start, please remember that UC Today is a completely independent news and insight service and does not play any role in endorsing or marketing any particular brands or products.
What can it do?
Cisco offers a total of four complete contact centre solutions:
Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express
Unified CCX, as it is known, is Cisco’s solution for small to mid-sized contact centres, or enterprise branches, with up to 400 seats. A virtual software platform for deployment on-premises, it offers integrated multi-channel contact management for voice, email, chat and social media, with sophisticated routing and in-depth reporting tools with full visualisation for dashboards and wallboards. Unified CCX supports ACD features such as conditional routing, call-in-queue and expected wait time, self-service IVR and advanced CTI.
Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise
The big brother of Unified CCX, the Enterprise edition is a powerful omni-channel contact platform with built-in integration of voice, email and IM to provide what Cisco calls the ‘customer collaboration’ experience. Support for web-based communication, including social media and business collaboration, creates a continuous flow from customers’ online activity through to back office connections where agents can find the right people to answer any kind of query. Advanced routing automatically matches customers to agents and resources based on needs, and Enterprise also builds its own customer profiles based on contact history to inform future decision making.
Cisco Packaged Contact Centre Enterprise
Packaged CCE takes all of the power of Unified Contact Centre Enterprise and distills the wide variety of deployment and configuration options into a complete, ready-to-run solution. It combines a preconfigured instance of Enterprise with three of Cisco’s contact centre ‘options’ (see below) - Unified Customer Voice Portal, Unified Intelligence Center and Cisco Finesse. Delivering all of the core omnichannel functions of Enterprise, its main advantages are that it simplifies installation, management and administration, and can plug easily into existing contact centre equipment through an open architecture and available APIs.
Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Centre
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Cisco's Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Centre is a cloud-based omni-channel platform.[/caption]
Cisco’s cloud-based contact centre solution, HCS for Contact Centre offers all of the flexibility and scalability of a hosted service, offering plug-in access to Cisco’s industry leading contact tools for organisations of anywhere between 10 and 12,000 agents. Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution is a comprehensive enterprise cloud communications platform, providing access to the full range of its UC, collaboration and contact centre tools. HCS for Contact Centre offers the same features and functionality as Unified Contact Centre Enterprise, all accessed via IP.
Cisco Contact Centre Options
On top of the main contact centre options, Cisco also makes available a broad suite of tools, some of which are bundled in with specific solutions. The main products include:
Finesse: A browser-based agent and supervisor desktop which offers single-pane-of-glass access and control for all Cisco contact centre tools