Cisco IPCC Express Edition (Cisco IPCC Express)

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1 White Paper Cisco IPCC Express Edition (Cisco IPCC Express) Executive Summary The Cisco IP Contact Center Express Edition (formerly Cisco IP ICD) product provides the functionality, ease of implementation, and price/performance that midsized contact centers demand of an advanced contact center solution: automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), and computer telephony integration (CTI) on a single platform. Offering a flexible and comprehensive set of queuing and contact routing options, complete CTI functionality, and inherent reporting capabilities, Cisco IPCC Express is an out of the box ACD solution that is easy to deploy, configure, manage, and scale. As a result, Cisco IPCC Express enables businesses to significantly improve customer service while controlling costs. Cisco IPCC Express is based on two technology enablers: Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) and Cisco IP Telephony. Cisco AVVID is a proven platform that enables enterprises to extend the value of their data network, allowing them to develop and deploy powerful IP network infrastructures that can scale to meet demanding new business processes and software applications. These technologies enable Cisco customers to quickly adapt to new applications, new business processes, and new competitive challenges. The convergence of voice, video and data on a single IP network is changing the way enterprises communicate. Voice and video can now be transported as high-priority data, lowering network costs and optimizing business communications. Cisco IP Telephony leverages the converged network to provide a superior level of business resilience and agility. Cisco IP Telephony Solutions dramatically enhance flexibility and effectiveness of communications, while providing a foundation for powerful new applications, such as Cisco IPCC Express, that extend the limits of traditional telephony. They communicate with traditional private branch exchange (PBX) and voic systems to enable smooth transitions from legacy systems. With Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), it is easy to add standards-based third-party equipment and applications. By providing a fully functional contact center that optimizes customer care and satisfaction and improves agent productivity while reducing application, installation, maintenance, and operating costs, Cisco IPCC Express is expressly designed for businesses that seek competitive differentiation and advantages through superior customer service. Cisco Customer Contact Solutions including the Cisco IPCC Express are defining the next chapter in customer service The Customer Interaction Network. The Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based customer service infrastructure that comprises a continuously evolving suite of innovative, multi-channel services and customer relationship management applications. These services and applications provide enhanced responsiveness and streamlined customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving your business a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction. Market Dynamics and Business Drivers As the primary point of contact between suppliers and customers, contact centers deliver significant competitive and market advantages. In today s climate of heightened competition and limited resources, maintaining superior levels of customer service has never been more critical to survival. Contact centers enable businesses to provide highly responsive services and customized communications to customers as a cornerstone of their customer retention and cross-selling strategies. In addition, market differentiation based on service is a critical means of building brand equity and attracting new customers. All contents are Copyright All rights reserved. Important Notices and Privacy Statement. Page 1 of 5

2 The sheer quantity of information that now bombards customers makes it ever harder for even an established brand to maintain visibility, as well as terrifyingly expensive to build a new one, according to The Economist, which adds, It can cost three or four times as much to acquire a new customer as to make a repeat sale to an existing one. Creating and sustaining customer satisfaction and loyalty is the mission of the contact center. Using IP technologies, a contact center can create a more enriching customer experience through intelligent features such as click to talk, intelligent routing to the right agent, and integrating Web and voice communications. In addition, IP technologies enable better contact center management. They allow distributed agents, located across time zones, to be efficiently managed and supported from a central point, and make it easier and less expensive for companies to do business any time, from any location. IP contact centers leverage and extend companies investments in customer relationship management (CRM) and data mining and extracting technologies. They route calls to the right agents, and give those agents the customer data to provide faster, more responsive service. They enable companies to monitor their levels of service, and continually improve its quality. Optimized contact center services and management can have a strong impact on both revenue and profits. Midsized companies are challenged to offer customer-facing services that are equal to or better than those offered by much larger companies and at a much lower cost. They must do more with less. Purchasing Criteria: Superior Performance and Cost Containment Companies with midsized contact centers have unique purchasing requirements when they evaluate contact center solutions. Their common needs include: Out-of-the-box functionality As a rule, midsized companies cannot afford to wait months for the configuration of their contact center infrastructure. Few have the technical personnel on staff to carry out or supervise such an initiative, and few want the financial burden that comes from long, complex deployments using third parties. These companies require a fully featured ACD system for call routing, call distribution, and contact management. They require IVR capabilities that permit customer self-service, userdirected call routing, and prompt-and-collect functions. Their systems should also enable easy integration of business applications such as CRM, and CTI, which provide agents with critical customer care information, ranging from customerentered screen pop data to information from the corporate customer database. In addition, supervisors require real-time reporting and the ability to monitor and manage both agent activity and call control. Ease of use, administration, and maintenance Companies seek to maximize their investment in user training and minimize the need for retraining. Through centralized control, they seek to manage location-independent contact centers efficiently, and to simplify the input of customer profiles and business rules across their organizations. Finally, they require technical support and maintenance programs that complement scarce internal IT support resources while remaining cost-effective. Network hosting efficiencies, scalability, and extensibility Purchasers of contact center solutions require the advantages of powerful server platforms. These platforms enable companies to consolidate contact center services, including ACD, IVR, and CTI capabilities, on a single server that can scale readily to handle more users and new applications. Enabling Technologies: Cisco AVVID and Cisco IP Telephony Networks based on Cisco AVVID and Cisco IP Telephony are enabling a new class of solutions that satisfy the purchasing criteria of small to midsized businesses. Cisco AVVID delivers superior quality of service (QoS), security, and network availability, thereby providing a solid foundation for supporting integrated applications and services. Cisco AVVID delivers significant return on investment (ROI) by lowering administrative costs, enhancing organizational and employee productivity, and improving customer service and loyalty. It provides the architecture for delivering real-time communications, dynamic data applications, storage, and content services to build an agile, resilient enterprise. This standards-based, open systems architecture provides a means for IP-based contact center solutions to coexist with time-division multiplexing (TDM)-based systems, and encourages a smooth migration path from a legacy call center to an IP-powered contact center. Using Cisco AVVID, an organization can incrementally add IP Telephony, IP-based services, new media channels and IP-based applications at its own pace, while taking advantage of its existing IP infrastructure and preserving legacy system investments. The benefits of IP Telephony include: Integration By leveraging the Cisco AVVID framework and applying the network intelligence inherent in IP, companies can take advantage of advanced tools to improve productivity. Intelligence Traffic prioritization and intelligent networking services, enabled by Cisco AVVID, maximize network efficiency for optimized application performance. All contents are Copyright All rights reserved. Important Notices and Privacy Statement. Page 2 of 5

3 Innovation The flexibility provided by Cisco AVVID gives customers the ability to adapt quickly in a competitive and changing business environment. Interoperability Standards-based APIs allow open-integration with third-party developers, providing customers with choices and flexibility. Built on the Cisco AVVID network infrastructure, a Cisco IP Telephony Solution delivers high-quality IP voice and fully integrated communications by allowing the transmission of voice, video and data over a single network infrastructure. Leveraging the framework provided by Cisco AVVID, it delivers superior performance and capabilities to address current and emerging communications needs in the environments ranging from small businesses to the enterprise. Cisco IP Telephony Solutions are designed to optimize feature functionality, reduce configuration and maintenance requirements, and provide interoperability with a wide variety of applications. The architecture of the Cisco IP Telephony Solution consists of four primary components: The Cisco AVVID network infrastructure includes public switched telephone network (PSTN) gateways, analog phone support, and digital signal processor (DSP) farms. The infrastructure can support multiple client types such as hardware phones, software phones, and video devices. Infrastructure also includes the interfaces and features necessary to integrate legacy PBX, voic , and directory systems. Communication endpoints User instruments such as a desk phone or a softphone application that runs on a PC. In the IP environment, each phone has an Ethernet connection. IP phones have all functions that users expect from a telephone, as well as more sophisticated features such as the ability to access Web sites. In a Cisco IP Telephony network, users can choose between familiar desk sets such as Cisco IP phones and PC-based phones such as the Cisco SoftPhone. Unlike traditional PBX systems, the moves, adds, and changes are virtually instantaneous. Cisco CallManager Call-processing agent that is the heart of the Cisco IP Telephony Solution. Cisco CallManager software extends enterprise telephony features and capabilities to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media processing devices, voice-over-ip (VoIP) gateways, and multimedia applications. Through open APIs, Cisco CallManager supports additional voice, video and data services such as unified messaging, multimedia conferencing, collaborative contact centers, and interactive multimedia response systems. Voice Applications As defined by Cisco AVVID, these are physically independent from the call-processing and voiceprocessing infrastructure, and may reside anywhere within the network. The single network infrastructure provides an open platform for powerful productivity applications, and serves as a foundation for future convergence-based applications that will continue to advance enterprise communications. The Solution: Cisco IPCC Express Cisco IPCC Express offers a fully featured solution for growing midsized companies that seek to manage customer voice contacts using the benefits of the converged Cisco IP Telephony architecture. Developed specifically for midsized contact centers, using Cisco AVVID and Cisco IP Telephony, Cisco IPCC Express provides sophisticated call routing, contact management, and administrative features to meet departmental, branch office, or midsized company customer care needs. Cisco IPCC Express is a fully featured, out of the box IP contact center solution that is designed to deliver three main benefits: improved customer satisfaction through optimized customer care; reduced application, installation and maintenance costs; and superior contact center productivity. Its features include: Intelligent call routing Routing such as conditional routing based on automatic number identification/dialed number identification service (ANI/DNIS), database lookup, time of day, day of week, real-time statistics; on-queue conditions; priority call routing; comprehensive and flexible skills-based routing; and priority queuing. Flexible desktop features Features such as full CTI capabilities; common agent and supervisor desktops across all Cisco customer interaction management products, including Cisco IP Contact Center Enterprise and Hosted Editions; a choice of agent and supervisor desktops, including Cisco Enhanced Agent and Enhanced Supervisor desktops; and Cisco IP Phone agent for the Cisco IP Phone 7960G and 7940G. Advanced Reporting and agent management options Options such as flexible resource selection; contact call detail records for the life of the call; real-time reports integrated within the agent and supervisor desktops; Enhanced Supervisor Desktop, allowing on-demand recording or viewing and listening to any recorded call. IVR support Support such as automating call handling by autonomous user interaction; processing user commands to facilitate self-service applications; performing prompt-andcollect functions to obtain user data; extracting and parsing Web content and presenting it to customers through a voice portal; support for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and textto-speech (TTS) options; full support for Voice Extensible Markup Language (VXML) Version 1.0 script interpretation; Web integration using HTML trigger pages and full XML parsing; allowing capture of XML data from enterprise Web servers; and support for e-notification services ( , paging, or faxes). All contents are Copyright All rights reserved. Important Notices and Privacy Statement. Page 3 of 5

4 Integration with Cisco CallManager Enabling administration of the contact center through a browser from any point on the WAN. In addition, Cisco IPCC Express is supported by Cisco s flexible suite of collaborative offerings that help businesses plan, design, implement, operate, and expand their contact center solution. Cisco IPCC Express offers organizations the ability to customize and prioritize services for their customers. An IP network infrastructure serves as a platform for emerging customer service applications, Web collaboration, and multimedia channel support. By increasing the ease of doing business, Cisco IPCC Express gives companies powerful customer contact and retention tools. Just as importantly, Cisco IPCC Express helps businesses reduce costs by maximizing their investments in contact center resources. Cisco IPCC Express is designed to drive costs out of the network infrastructure through its use of open platforms that are less expensive and easier to maintain than legacy, TDM-based systems. This can eliminate the extra programming needed to integrate CTI capabilities and best-in-class CRM solutions. Cisco IPCC Express also helps improve agent productivity by enabling both centralized and distributed call processing. Agents may be dispersed across any number of locations, such as regional branches, home offices, or 24/7 follow the sun support centers, and managed centrally. Cisco IPCC Express: Return-on-Investment (ROI) Scenarios A Cisco study of customers who have deployed IP-based networks shows that they saved costs in infrastructure; long-distance toll bypass; equipment and software upgrades and expansion; moving, adding or changing users; and in voice circuit consolidation. While individual ROI scenarios varied, the survey found that on average those that replaced older TDM-based PBX equipment with an IPbased solution experienced ROI within 18 months. Companies with newer PBXs that had not been depreciated over as long a period saw ROI at about 24 months. Companies building a converged IP network infrastructure from the beginning realized an ROI at about six months. The following ROI scenario is from Arrendale Associates. Arrendale Associates Cisco IP Communications Provides Rx for Lower Costs and Better Service Background Since its founding in 1989, Arrendale Associates, Inc. ( has successfully served a highly demanding audience-physicians and hospitals. The Cornelius, NC-based company delivers both end-to-end software solutions and outsourced services that transcribe doctor-dictated clinical notes into accurate, archived records that document patients symptoms and the strategies for treating them. Challenges Arrendale s help desk includes 32 agents distributed among facilities in Cornelius (a suburb of Charlotte), Annapolis, MD, and Knoxville, TN. The company provides support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year to clients across the United States, handling an average of 30 calls per day. Arrendale also has a data link to a facility in India to deliver overnight transcription services. Because the company s lifeline is its data and voice communications infrastructure, it became imperative that Arrendale Associates replace its traditional voice system with a solution that could deliver enhanced customer service capabilities, increased agent productivity, and reduced operational costs. Our business is dictation services and solutions for physicians, explains Chuck Bennett, Arrendale Associates Vice President of Operations. As Bennett began a technology review, he identified a number of business objectives. Arrendale wanted to create an integrated, distributed contact center environment capable of linking agents in its three contact centers using robust, feature-rich services such as centralized call processing, advanced call management and queuing functions, CTI and centralized reporting. The company also wanted to deliver better customer service and lower telephony costs by replacing the expensive long distance circuits that connected its three locations, while simultaneously improving agent productivity. Bennett s ultimate goal was to create a communications infrastructure at Arrendale that could provide a scalable platform for new applications and services. Solution With these goals in mind, Arrendale Associates decided to migrate its existing, traditional call center to a converged environment by deploying a Cisco IP Communications solution. Moving to such an environment gave Arrendale what it required: a flexible, scalable infrastructure that supports key IP-based applications including call handling and unified communications to lower telephony costs, simplify network administration, and optimize organizational Bennett turned to Cisco because of its breadth of integrated solutions and services, and its reputation for high performance and reliability. Cisco is the leader in voice over IP. We ve had Cisco routers for seven years now, and they ve been incredibly reliable. Cisco makes great products, so our decision was almost a nobrainer. Arrendale Associates deployed an IP Communications system that includes Cisco CallManager, the software-based call-processing component of the Cisco IP Telephony Solution, Cisco 7960 IP All contents are Copyright All rights reserved. Important Notices and Privacy Statement. Page 4 of 5

5 phones, Cisco IPCC Express, a robust contact center solution designed for midsized contact centers that provides ACD, IVR and CTI on a single platform, and Cisco Unity Unified Messaging, a powerful unified messaging solution that delivers every , voice, and fax message to a single inbox. The company also deployed a number of Cisco VG200 telephony voice gateways, and Cisco 3600 Series routers with Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) for redundancy. Results The total IP Communications deployment took only five months. We deployed this new solution between January and May 2002, and it went very smoothly, Bennett says, Our staff was trained in a couple of days. The Cisco IPCC Express solution worked right out of the box within a week of beginning deployment and configuration of CTI screen pop, call recording, and call monitoring capabilities. Although the solution is still in its early stages, Bennett notes that Arrendale has already realized its primary goal reducing long-distance expenses by about $2000 a month. Deploying Cisco IP communications has dramatically improved Arrendale s customer service capabilities as well. The improved call management and contact distribution technologies have destroyed the old inbound call bottleneck. Now calls can be routed to the best available agent, screen pops provide crucial customer and trouble ticket information, and Arrendale s clients get both access and visibility to trouble ticket status, Bennett says. I ve gone from having only one available agent to having nine agents who can handle an incoming call. That s huge. The productivity improvement is great. The results are a 900% increase in agent availability. This technology, he says, is really going to put us ahead of our competition. Conclusion Contact centers offering front-line responses to customer needs, problems, questions, and relationship-enhancing opportunities have become mission critical and an integral part of many voice infrastructure decisions. The contact center can generate revenue through direct sales, and it protects revenue with customer service or technical support. However, it also requires cost containment in areas such as network hosting, agent administration, agent location changes, and integration costs between front-end call treatment and agent queuing. One recent survey found that about two-thirds of customerrelationship-management projects fail, according to The Economist. The trick is not merely to cut costs, but also to retain old-fashioned values of customer service. The advent of two enabling technologies, Cisco AVVID and Cisco IP Telephony, has helped create a platform for new applications, better customer-handling processes, and new means of increasing productivity and moving cost out of the contact center. Cisco IPCC Express is one product in Cisco s range of products that support call centers from midsized contact centers to large enterprise contact centers. For companies with midsized contact centers, Cisco has developed Cisco IPCC Express, an integrated solution that meets their infrastructure needs, and provides: Superior price/performance, with a fully-featured IP contact distribution solution. An out of the box solution that is easy to install, manage, and scale. A means of both reducing costs and improving customer service. By addressing these needs, and satisfying or exceeding their criteria in the selection of a contact center infrastructure, Cisco IPCC Express is a highly strategic technology investment that provides growing businesses with a tangible competitive advantage. Corporate Headquarters 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA USA Tel: NETS (6387) Fax: European Headquarters Cisco Systems International BV Haarlerbergpark Haarlerbergweg CH Amsterdam The Netherlands www-europe.cisco.com Tel: Fax: Americas Headquarters 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA USA Tel: Fax: Asia Pacific Headquarters Capital Tower 168 Robinson Road #22-01 to #29-01 Singapore Tel: Fax: Cisco Systems has more than 200 offices in the following countries and regions. 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