Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise Review: Faster Time to Value

Cisco has made deep inroads into the contact centre management space. It offers its solutions as three distinct tiers, designed for mid-sized, large, and growing enterprises. We think this is an extremely effective approach, as it allows Cisco to tailor the feature set as per the predicted scale requirements. Today, we are reviewing the Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise for contact centres that have up to 12,000 agents.

Apart from the Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise, you also have the Unified Contact Center Enterprise for 24,000 agents, and the Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center for 10-24,000 agents. Among all of these, Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise probably has the simplest deployment model and fastest time to value, but it might lack some of the flexibility and customisation that comes with the Unified offering.

Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise includes a pre-packaged deployment framework, that’s easy to manage. Its USP is a clear price advantage and reduced pre- and post-sales efforts. Let’s review its features in greater detail.

Inside Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise

Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise has a host of useful features and capabilities. Broadly, it can be segregated into three components: Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Unified Customer Voice Portal, and Unified CCE. The Unified Communications Manager provides scalable call control and session management. The customer voice portal is designed as a configurable, AI-powered IVR system. And unified CCE brings together chat, email, business intelligence and a web-based client for contact centre agents to use on their desktops.

While Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise shares a few features with the other two tiers we mentioned, it also has several differentiators of its own. Here is a quick review:

• Massive scalability – The solution is compatible with up to 12000 agents and an operating speed of 105 calls per second. Each agent can be assigned up to 50 queues across 15,000 call types. This means that you can optimise the utilisation of your contact centre team like never before
• Third-party applications – Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise comes with the unique ability to fetch data from outside applications. Powered by its application gateway, it can support company-specific business processes and requirements
• Seamless integration – Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise dramatically reduces the need to integrate third-party applications and makes sure that the integration process is seamless when it is absolutely necessary. The Packaged solution has inbound/outbound voice, video support, IVR, and web interactions. It can be integrated with CRM, workforce management, and other popular contact centre tools
• Third-party hardware – This is among the most compelling USPs of Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise. By opting for an intelligent, specification-based configuration, you can continue to use non-Cisco servers and hardware components
• Deployment visibility – Deploying a feature-rich contact centre solution across multiple customer support locations is a long, complex process. That’s why Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise gives you a visual representation of the process, thanks to its fixed deployment model. This representation covers critical parameters across operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning, while constantly monitoring system health

Why Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise Makes a Difference

In addition to the specific features we just reviewed, Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise checks all the right boxes when it comes to contact centre management. For instance, Cisco Finesse is a thin client interface which can be used by agents and supervisors to keep track of service delivery. Small features like business hour administration and secure transport of personally identifiable information (PII) also makes a big difference.

Interestingly, Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise treats your IT network like an “intelligent switch” to reduce the cost of long-distance calls and bandwidth consumption.

Finally, we were deeply impressed by the solution’s contextualisation capabilities, ensuring an uninterrupted flow of information across channels. As customers are transferred among agents or switch between platforms, they do not have to enter their data all over again.

What We Think

The most standout aspect of the Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise is its immense scalability. You can grow your contact centre to up to 12,000 agents, and still enjoy a simple, straightforward and easy to manage deployment experience.

For mid-tier companies who cater to a large volume of customer queries every day, Cisco Packaged Contact Center Enterprise is the way to go. The cost component is lesser than Cisco’s Unified offering, and you get multi-channel self-service to boot. Single sign-on (SSO) PII encryption and bundled outbound calling make this an excellent choice.