Question about dial plan and UCCX

[demerson111]

Question that I probably should have asked a while ago, but depending on the response I get will make me much more critical of any future changes to our phone system:

What is Cisco's recommendation for implementing ACD, UCCX, Call center- however you want to put it- extensions and the dial plan for such?

I've been told by an engineer from our newly contracted managed service provider that the dial plan for these extensions, and for all extension across the board for that matter should have a uniform length. ie four digits in our case.

However, previously- and to be honest this method makes way more sense to me- the designing engineer had simply placed an extra digit in front of an individuals phone DN and used that as the agents ACD ext. For example, if the last 4 digits of someone's extension was 1234, his or her agent extension would be 51234, and everyone in our Phoenix office would simply receive an agent extension preceded by a 5 if they were part of a phone queue.

Generally speaking, I get it, the dial plan should be uniform in digit length, but does that really even matter when coming up with these UCCX agent extensions? It has been a hassle because now at his recommendation, and me having to shoulder the work, I've been satisfying his criteria of using only four digits, which has been somewhat confusing for our end users.

Interested to hear anyone's feedback, thanks.

[Deepak Rawat · Accepted solution]

In terms of agent extension the approach that you previous designer had adopted is pretty much ok wherein he placed an extra digit 5 in front of their actual DN to make it an IPCC DN. That being said, you can continue with this approach and there is really no necessity for the agent extension to be only of four digits, UCCX really does not care about it to be honest as long as it does not exceed 13 characters. What we care about regarding agents is covered in the below document very clearly, refer Unsupported Configurations and Scenarios for Unified CCX, Unsupported and Supported Configurations for Agent Phones and Unsupported Actions for Unified CCX Agents sections of below document:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/cust_contact/contact_center/crs/express_11_5/release/guide/rcct_b_release-notes-for-unified-contact/rcct_b_release-notes-for-unified-contact_chapter_00.html#topic_DD44357DFFED65C39ACEC4B24A3F390D

Regards

Deepak

[Jonathan Schulenberg]

I mostly agree with Deepak here but care should be taken to avoid T.302 inter-digit timeouts because of multiple potential matches. That would be a CUCM best practice regardless of CCX.

For example: 51234 and 1234 are OK but 55123 and 5512 would be a problem. That shouldn't cause a real life problem for CCX though. All of the CTI events from CCX to CUCM will be en-bloc matched and not subject to the T.302 timer; however, agent transfers could get wonky and give the perception of a bexcuse of CUCM waiting for the timer to expire.