Are there advantages to use two extensions for CAD Agents?

[JoeMattia]

Hello,

back in 2007 when we moved from a Cisco IPCC Express system over to a UCCE system, we were asked if our agents needed to have two extensions; one for ACD calls and a second for personal calls (non-ACD calls directly to them). At the time we were never informed on the advantages of doing that, so we never took that path.

Now, we're finding that some of our call centre agents are receiving transferred calls from other agents and we would like to know if having two extensions might help us track these transfers better.

For example, sales agent A takes an ACD call, gets about 90% through with the sale but the customer would like to think about it before completing the sale. The next day, this customer calls back ready to complete the sale but gets agent B, who in turn transfers this caller to agent A so that agent A can get the commision. Currently these calls are showing up in the External Out or Internal Out Tasks in the Cisco WebView Agent reports.

Is there any major advantage of having two extensions for agents to use?

In our case, the agent ACD extenisons which they'd use to log into CAD would be different than their personal extension. Then, if agent B gets a call and knows that it's a sale that agent A would like to complete to get the commision, then agent B would transfer that caller to agent A's personal extension instead of his/her ACD extension.

Does this make life more complicated, or is this the better way to go and what will this give us with respect to Cisco WebView Agent reports?

We're currently running UCCE 7.2(7) with CM 4.1(3) and CAD 7.2(1) SR2.

If anyone has any suggestions or insight into this, it would greatly help us out.

Thanks,

Joe

[geoff]

I have a number of customers who have agents with two lines as you mentioned.

1. Contact center line, no call waiting, no voice mail, auto answer

2. Private line, Unity, call waiting

Non-agents have just one line, configured as in 2.

The contact center line is not reachable from the private lines. Internal route points exist so that back-office staff can transfer a customer into the queuing platform so it ends up with agents on line 1. Contact center calls are normally not transferred to private lines.

It's difficult to marry the demands of contact centers with the need to send a given call to a particular agent. If you transfer to the private line, the call just disappears out of ICM.

There is nothing wrong with one contact centre agent  transferring to another contact centre agent. The information is in the TCD and WebView. It will be far worse if you transfer to the private line.

For the customers who have these two lines, UCCE 8.0 introduces the ability for ICM to manage the two lines a bit better. We don't worry about it - agents have very strict instructions.

(a) if a call arrives on their private line while on a call, the ignore it and it goes to voice mail

(b) if a call arrives on their private line while in the ready state, they first go not ready and then answer the call

(c) if they want to make an outbound call on their private line, they go not ready

Some of the better agents break (b) but are prepared to drop the private line when a CC call arrives.

If your agents don't have Unity voice mail, two lines doesn't add anything really, and I would skip it.

Regards,

Geoff

[JoeMattia]

Geoff,

that totally makes sense. I would agree that if we went that route we would lose the WebView reporting since the call would be transferred to the agent's non ACD extension which is not associated with that agent's CAD.

Thank you for your quick reply on this question, it truely helped.

Regards,

Joe