Building our first Call Tree/Auto Attendant

[art.lacie]

We will have a small contact center of about 8 people. What is the value in building a company's whole call tree/AA design in CCX? Easier for the builder? Or does it have added value for the caller/staff?

Thanks

[Deepak Rawat]

Hi Art,

When you say value, I am assuming you are not referring to price or SKU details to purchase UCCX and other licensing features. If that is true ,then it is possible to achieve almost what ever you want through UCCX scripting and its ACD capabilities. To get all the scripting features that UCCX provides, you will require Premium license and you will be good to go for anything.

If you are some one who is new to scripting then also don't worry. We have lot of active members on the support community and other dev sites wherein you can get assistance on creating scripts and other stuff.

Regards

Deepak

[art.lacie]

Not as in cost, because we already have our Enhanced seats and licenses purchased. That being said, why would we building our entire call tree (office + ccx lines) inside CCX vs CUCM?

[Deepak Rawat]

Simple becuase CUCM cannot provide you the amount of functionality that UCCx can give. CUCM is mainly for call routing and UCCX on the other hand is used for both I.e., IVR and ACD ())Automatic Call Distribution). CUCM does not provide you the option of checking conditions such as if true do this if not do that. You can give callers an option is listening to various prompts, enter DTMF, retrieve their account details and not what. These are two different products altogether and UCCX when it comes to play with conditions and providing different options to the caller is far way ahead than CUCM. I can keep writing on and on about CCX but the point should be very clear as of now. So in nutshell, if you have deployed CCX start exploiting it and you will automatically come to know over the time what is the difference.

Regards

Deepak

[art.lacie]

We are mostly selling event tickets, and there isn't a huge demand for customer profiles or databases - at least we don't really see that as being a priority.

You can keep going if you wish - haha. I'm just wondering how much extra CCX purchases would need to be made outside of 8 CCX Enhanced seats and Mediasense. We are roughly looking at 10 call menu options, and one of those options drills into a CCX team with 5 menu options to buy tickets or rent space, etc.

[Deepak Rawat]

As far as your seats are concerned, let me tell you how it works. There are two things in UCCX:

1) Agent Seats

2) Ports

Whenever a call comes to UCCX, it comes at the route point and then cti port. Call will remain on the cti port till the time it does not get an available agent or call gets disconnected for any reason. So lets say if you have 8 enhanced seats this means you can have 8 agents at a time taking to 8 customers. Even then calls will keep coming in UCCx and will be handled by these CTI ports and once any agent will get free call will be delivered to him/her making that port free.

So ideally if you have 50 ports and 8 enhanced seats license this means 8 agents can be on call and still the system can handle 50 more calls. As soon as an agent becomes available call will be delivered to that agent making the port free. Callers while waiting for an available agent will remain on these ports and will get all the treatment as designed in the script such as music on hold, announcements etc. For every one call, UCCX will assign one port randomly.

To check how many ports you have go to UCCX admin page, system >> license >> Display license

Regards

Deepak

[art.lacie]

Thanks for this. I do understand what you have said. But we envisioned CCX for our ticketing center - so customers can buy tickets (and we can monitor our agents and record calls). We don't expect super high call volumes. Other items will be in our regular menu (staff directory, hours of operation, restaurant, General Inquiries etc - basically non-sales related stuff).

[Deepak Rawat]

UCCX can do all this for you. If your agents will be using Cisco Agent Desktop to handle calls, then UCCX can provide the option of recording and monitoring their calls both natively without you need to deploy anything extra. In case, if they will be using Finesse then you will need to setup Media Sense to record their calls. Monitoring in this case can be performed using Call Manager through the Built in Bridge feature of the IP Phones.

Regards

Deepak

[art.lacie]

Exactly. We have decided to go with Finesse for this option - and the necessary Mediasense as a result.

I'm still wondering what benefit would it be to use CCX as a call handler for menus outside of ticket sales. Only options that reach an Agent should be in CCX, correct?

[Deepak Rawat]

Yes that is correct, calls reaching to the agents by pressing some option is something you are getting inside UCCX. But lets say you configure an option # 9 that  does not route the call to agent but in fact to the voicemail or any other directory number that exists in CUCM but is not an UCCX agent, then in that case UCCX is just playing the role of an intermediate.

This kind of functionality can be achieved through Unity connection as well but that will remain very simple, play the prompt give callers an option to enter DTMF and that's it. But in UCCX, you can play with it as you have all the permutations and combinations to apply.

At this point, since you will be doing simple logic and stuff therefore you might not be looking at UCCX as a complete and more powerful solution then Unity connection but as I said this is something you will learn and feel over a period of time.

Regards

Deepak

[art.lacie]

I appreciate you answering all my questions!

I still don't really see a 'use case' for my business yet in what we've discussed. I think because our CCX isn't very large, and our general package is rather small, maybe we are just keeping it simple.

I'm new to Cisco, and our provider is brand new to CCX/Finesse etc., so we want to make sure we get all the features we will need during setup to avoid more cost later down the road - obviously there will be things we don't even know we need until we arrive at a problem or creative idea.

[Deepak Rawat]

Hi Art,

I understand it is just a start and you still have a long way to cover. So, I would recommend just start using the product and use it as the requirement comes.

Regards

Deepak