Cisco has lots more than only the Webex suite up its sleeve. The company has a pretty expensive and powerful contact centre offering, available as packaged, unified or hosted solutions. Today, we are reviewing the Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise, designed for large-sized contact centres.
As your business grows and the customer support needs grow with it, contact centres will inevitably get more complex and sprawling in nature. How do you maintain centralised control of the various moving parts? That’s where a solution like Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise comes in. It combines IVR-based self-service, customer feedback gathering, and omni-channel interactions in a comprehensive bundle. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise is highly popular, rated 4.1 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights.
Inside Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise
Like most other Cisco solutions, Unified Contact Center Enterprise offers an incredible breadth of capabilities. Here is a quick review of its features:
- Agent communication – Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise equips agents with multi-channel communication capabilities, spanning chat, email, and web call back. The web call back feature is particularly useful, as customers can request a callback once an agent is available – and there is live chat as well
- Cisco Finesse – Finesse is an app that gives contact centre supervisors easy access to customer data. Agents can strengthen their service capabilities with contextual information. The Cisco Finesse API lets companies develop tailored capabilities to meet their specific requirements
- Agent whisper and remote support – Agent whisper conveys short, customisable announcements to agents before transferring a call. This gives them a context to communication, improving their problem resolution capabilities. Remote support allows agents to log in from either their branch or home, using broadband internet or telephone lines – Cisco enables this via Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
- Self-service – interestingly, self-service through IVR isn’t available out of the box. But you can integrate Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise with the company’s unified customer voice portal at an additional cost, or opt for a third-party IVR instead
- Open systems – The utilisation of open architecture has become somewhat of a signature move at Cisco. It drives interoperability like never before, and Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise is no different. You can integrate it with existing contact centre solutions and keep extending it as new features/tools become available
- Reporting and analytics – Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise offers real-time and historical data necessary for report generation. This gives you insights into the performance of customer handling procedures and your active staffing levels. The data can be plugged into the Cisco Unified Intelligence Centre for custom report generations
- Cloud Connect Platform – This is a recently added feature in Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise’s latest release. It lets you add on cloud-based services, enhancing the capabilities of your on-premise systems, by using a common data format
- Virtual assistant – You can integrate Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise with a cloud-based speech engine like Google Dialogflow. This introduces a bevvy of conversational capabilities that can be used to build a virtual assistant for customer self-service
Why Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Makes a Difference
Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise was always an effective solution for large contact centres, and this is made even better with the latest release. For instance, there is a trial feature called Analyzer, giving you a dashboard view of abandoned calls. There is also a transcript feature (also trial) powered by Voicea, auto-creating a transcript from voice conversations.
In other words, if you run a contact centre with 12,000 to 24,000 agents, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise is among the best options out there. One customer on Gartner Peer Insights called it “the most stable voice platform I ever worked with,” indicating its very real market potential.
What We Think
When it comes to contact centre management, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise does not disappoint. While it would have been nice to have advanced business intelligence and IVR available out of the box, it may not be feasible at the ~ 24,000 agent scale. Given the volume and feature set, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise has a highly competitive value proposition.
The latest additions of cloud capabilities and third-party virtual assistants is the cherry on the icing. For companies who have recently undergone a growth spurt and must immediately upgrade their contact centre capabilities, Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise makes perfect sense.
