Can you Maximize Native Queueing in CUCM?

For Cisco users managing a call center, deploying Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) delivers a robust platform with IVR, skills-based routing, historical reporting and Intelligence Center Reporting (CUIC). Though licenses are available in as few as 10 seats, UCCX is an expensive resource that can be taxing to implement and maintain for smaller organizations. Cisco understood this concern and adapted their Call Manager to meet the needs of the small to mid-market client.

In Cisco Call Manager 9.x, queuing capabilities were introduced to extend hunt pilot functionality, allowing callers to be placed in a queue while they wait for an agent to become available to answer their call. This change greatly improved user experience; instead of callers hearing continual ringing as the phone system sought an available agent, the callers hear a greeting and music on hold as they wait.

Despite these improvements, there was still an element missing to transform the Cisco Call Manager into a functional call center solution: visibility. Without the ability to monitor and track call queues and agent performance, call center teams and managers are operating blind, unable to understand their call volume, problem areas, scheduling needs, or service level. QLIVE solves this need-gap.

How Does QLive Monitoring Leverage CUCM to Deliver the Capabilities of UCCX?

Let's be clear. UCCX is a very powerful call center solution that includes conditional routing, agent skill and competency-based routing, wrap-up code categorization, and priority queuing as well as historical and live reporting. QLive does not route calls, nor influence the queuing order. It cannot escalate VIP calls or identify skilled agents to assign certain calls to it.

However, QLive does provide live data on queues, identify which hunt groups are backing-up, locate available agents, track key performance indicator (KPI) metrics and deliver timely notifications whenever there is a problem. It also can provide live data on agent activity and idleness levels and enable teams to self-manage through wallboards, supervisor dashboards and agent dashboards.

Conclusion

For Cisco customers who need sophisticated call routing and advanced workforce management tools, UCCX is still the best choice. For those customers who have a smaller contact center or a large call center that requires only simple queuing functionality, adding QLive to maximize the capabilities of their existing Cisco Call Manager offers a viable alternative to UCCX at a fraction of the cost.

Learn more about the native queuing capabilities of Cisco Call Manager: http://tinyurl.com/CiscoNativeQueue

To discover how QLive might help your business, visit http://www.metropolis.com/QLIVE