What is Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX)?

What is Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCE)
Reza Mousavi
Reza Mousavi
6 min read

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express meets the requirements of midmarket and corporate branch offices or departmental businesses that need easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use, safe, virtual, extraordinarily accessible, and advanced management of client communication.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) is a “contact center in a box,” providing a customer interaction management solution for up to 400 agents that is safe and simple to deploy. It is an Automated Call Distribution (ACD) scheme based on IP that queues and distributes incoming calls intended for customers (agents) of Cisco Unified Communications Manager organizations.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express features strong, agent-based service, as well as fully integrated self-service apps, which leads to decreased company expenses and enhanced client reaction by providing a sophisticated and distributed automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), integration of computer telephony (CTI) and single-server agent and desktop services.

Unified CCX offers a multimedia (voice, information, and internet) customer-care application environment that enhances contact center effectiveness by simplifying business integration, facilitating agent management, improving agent flexibility, and improving network hosting.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express helps to guarantee the inbound and outbound voice and email guidelines for your company. In contrast, customer interaction management helps guarantee the first delivery of each contact to the correct agent.

Maximum ROI is given for contact centers when your company’s business rules can impact the contact center’s conduct. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express’s routing capacities facilitate categorizing and prioritizing client contacts in a manner that best meets your company’s needs to guarantee that each contact is routed to the correct agent at the correct place the first time, maximizing the first call resolution.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express’s routing promotes a wide variety of routing logic that can precisely target and selectively route various contact classes or even identify individual contacts for tailored, prioritized routing.

Unified CCX offers alternatives for addressing functional areas of various contact centers, such as:

  • Inbound voice
  • Outbound campaign
  • Agent email
  • Webchat
  • Social Media integration
  • Next-generation historical and real-time reports and dashboards

To collect caller information and classify incoming calls, the Unified CCX can be used to route calls to particular agents or even integrate with Unified IP IVR.

Developers can use Unified CCX to integrate by:

  • Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Protocol: enables clients to create desktops and reporting applications for custom 3rd party agents and supervisors.
  • REST API Set-up: allows clients to access the configuration of the administrator to create a custom administration interface or automate the installation of Unified CCX.
  • Cisco Unified CCX Editor: allows clients to use a visual programming environment to generate telephony and multimedia application scripts.
  • Cisco Identity Service Client SDK: allows end consumers to use different web applications and apps constructed with the REST APIs within the Cisco Contact Center solution after a single login.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express is accessible in three packages (Standard 11.0 and below, Enhanced, Premium), all customized to satisfy the requirements of your client contact.

Profits for business

Profits for business

  • Improved client satisfaction and allegiance with full contact
  • Important cost optimization with an all-in-one solution that is easy to deploy and easy to use
  • Improved productivity of the workforce so that you can do more with less

See http:/www.cisco.com/c/en/us/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-express/index.html for more data on the Unified CCX product.

Technical summary

UCCX-Architecture-developer

The Unified CCX scheme includes the following parts that provide other apps with programmable interfaces:

  • Unified CCX Engine
  • Administration API Web Application
  • Finesse

Besides these parts operating on UCCX, SocialMiner, which is used in client cooperation chat and email channels in the UCCX solution, offers interfaces for building custom internet chat clients.

Unified CCX Engine

The Unified CCX Engine performs the Contact Center Express critical tasks, including:

  • IVR features for voice calls
  • Programmable scripting
  • Management of agents and contacts
  • Queue contact and routing
  • Integration of computer telephony (CTI)
  • Live data generation and historical reports

The CTI Server and the Programmable Scripting Engine are the two interfaces that are capable of interacting with the Unified CCX Engine for external apps.

CTI-Protocol-Architecture

CTI Server

To name a few, the CTI Server is responsible for keeping track of calls, agent states, and socket connections to all CTI clients. It also processes CTI customer applications and sends updates when modifications occur. The CTI customers connect and communicate via the Unified CCX CTI Protocol to the CTI Server / CCX Engine. Applications can use the CTI Protocol to:

  • make agent login requests
  • manage state
  • make/answer/drop calls
  • receive agent and team configuration events
  • silently monitor calls
  • and many more operations

Programmable Scripting Engine

Unified CCX offers developers the capacity to program the engine’s company logic of managing a Voice Call or a Web User Contact. Scripting involves building the business workflow using the Unified CCX Editor, a proprietary domain-specific programming tool, and saving the defined workflow as a file to be uploaded to UCCX via the web administration and REST interface.

The Unified CCX Editor offers a graphical user interface for creating and testing the script offline or directly causing a voice call or HTTP on the UCCX server to which the Editor is attached.

It is necessary to select the script’s individual programming steps from a current set of steps. If the available steps are not sufficient, the Java programming language can be used to implement customized actions.

API-UCCX

Unified web application for CCX administration

The Unified CCX Administration Web Application exposes REST APIs for setup, which can be used to conduct all UCCX system configurations on Day 1 and Day 2. These setup APIs can be used to perform all original system setups and configuration tasks usually performed after installation.

The following diagrams outline the standard URL structure of the configuration APIs and the supported typical operations.

CCX-Config-Restful-API

CCX-API-Operation

The typical flow of an entity’s updating activities must be:

1-Retrieving all instances of the entity
2-Choose the instance to be modified and get the instance Id
3-Retrieve the information on the specific instance, using the instance Id of the entity
4-Make the required modifications to the entity payload
5-Update the specific entity using the updated entity payload

Some of the examples of what Configuration/Administration APIs can be used to build are:

  • Advanced Campaign Management
  • Agent Reskilling

Ciscco-Finesse-Integration

Finesse

Finesse offers REST APIs for voice call control and state administration of agents. In connection with the Unified CCX Engine, Finesse uses the CTI Protocol. Finesse is co-resident with UCCX in a Unified CCX solution, which means it is a component of the Unified CCX installer.

The customers will be agnostic of the CTI protocol when using the Finesse REST APIs. The REST APIs abstract all call control operations and agent state management activities traditionally conducted using CTI emails.

Facebook-Messenger-Integration

SocialMiner

Cisco SocialMiner functions as the point of entry for chat and email channels in a UCCX solution. It handles the chat and email media flow to the client who launched the chat or email from the agent desktop.

SocialMiner displays REST APIs that can be used for UCCX internet chat custom internet customers.

What can a Unified CCX developer do?

Unified CCX enables three integration points for developers:

1-CTI Protocol: CTI protocol can create an agent desktop, create a reporting application, or integrate it into an existing application. The CTI Protocol Developer Guide provides documentation.

2-Configuration APIs: These APIs can create a custom administrator application or automate the Unified CCX system setup. Documentation can be discovered in the Developer Guide for the Configuration API.

3-Scripting: Scripting enables clients to use a visual programming environment to produce telephony and multimedia application scripts. The Scripting and Development Series Guide provides documentation.

4-Identity Service: The SDK Identity Service Client enables end customers to use different web applications and apps constructed with the REST APIs within the Cisco Contact Center solution after a single login. The Cisco Identity Service Client SDK Guide provides documentation.

In addition to the above points of integration with Unified CCX, the Unified CCX solution contains two additional points of integration:

1-Finesse REST APIs: You can use the Finesse REST APIs to perform agent operations like login, change status, and make calls. The Finesse Developers Guide provides documentation.

2-SocialMiner: You can use the SocialMiner REST APIs to create custom internet customers for an internet chat with UCCX. Documentation can be discovered in the Developer Guide for SocialMiner.