Why Multichannel Routing?

[sajith]

Greetings!

We at Cisco Customer Care Business Unit (CCBU) have been on a mission to make Enterprise Contact Center offer a great experience for our customers.

So why enable multichannel routing?

We as customers are evolving. With the proliferation of smartphones and mobile devices, we are now engaging with each other and with businesses through more and more newer communication channels than ever before. To give few examples - Facebook hit 1.7 Billion active users per month around June 2016. WhatsApp hit 1 Billion active users per month in February, 2016. That means around 1 in 7 people in this world are using these digital channels of communication extensively. WeChat's penetration rate in China's tier one cities (with > 10 million in population) is above 90%. Analysts predict that more than 50% of all customer interactions in 2016 will be via these new digital channels.

As the customer care market transitions from voice-centric to more and more non-voice-centric channels, we at Cisco want to ensure that we equip our customers and our ecosystem partners with the right tools to build great apps & services and more importantly great experiences that caters to these changing market needs.

Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) is an open platform by design. One of the USPs of CCE is its powerful routing and agent/contact control engines. However, these open interfaces have been more or less voice-centric. With multichannel Task Routing capability, Cisco's Contact Center Enterprise customers and ecosystem partners will have the ability to integrate their mobile and web-based multichannel applications to use CCE's dynamic routing engine, queuing mechanism and flexible reporting. Task Routing APIs can be used to seamlessly integrate back office and cloud-based applications like CRM and ticketing systems to provide a 360-degree view of your customers. This along with Cisco Context Service will help create a unified experience for customer interactions across channels making CCE a powerful out-of-the-box Omnichannel Customer Care solution.

This capability is available on all Contact Center Enterprise solutions starting release 11.5 (Packaged CCE, Unified CCE and Hosted CCE).

The Task Routing DevNet microsite will provide you with vast amount of resources like API guides, sample code, JavaScript gadgets and libraries, sandbox, etc. to get you started on multichannel integration and routing.

If you have comments, suggestions or feature/enhancement requests regarding multichannel task routing, please use this community to let us know. If you are facing issues with your Task Routing integration, please open a ticket from the Developer Support page and we will be happy to assist.

Thanks and Happy Task Routing!

Sajith Kaimal

Product Manager, Enterprise Contact Center

[shehzad.iqbal]

Hi Sajith,

How do you handle multichannel tasks such as chats where it is must that to open a conversation mode and the replies from the customer must go to the last agent? Is it being handled with "interactive MRDs" automatically in Cisco? So, if we build our own app such as an SMS app and set it's MRD as 'interactive', How Cisco will treat subsequent replies from the customer to the agent?

[soman.nair]

Hi sajith and CBABU team,

Is the feature of "sticky agent" feasible by using Task Routing API's.

I couldn't locate the details regarding known issues/bugs/limitations of using this API in the micro-site. Are there any recent documents sharing these details.

- Soman.

[sajith]

Hi Shehzad,

Task Route request must be sent once by the (chat/SMS) application. Once agent gets the task, the conversation / media needs to be handled by the application on both the customer and agent sides.

Regards, Sajith

[sajith]

Hi Soman,

Could you elaborate on the sticky agent use case?

If the application has knowledge of CCE agent's routable ID (peripheral + agent ID), it can pass it on via Call / ECC variables for CCE to route to that specific agent.

Regards, Sajith