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UCCX - 11 - Unified CCX Design Guide 11

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482 views126 pages

UCCX - 11 - Unified CCX Design Guide 11

Uploaded by

yuri
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Design Guide, Release 11.

0(1)
First Published: August 27, 2015

Americas Headquarters
Cisco Systems, Inc.
170 West Tasman Drive
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USA
http://www.cisco.com
Tel: 408 526-4000
800 553-NETS (6387)
Fax: 408 527-0883
THE SPECIFICATIONS AND INFORMATION REGARDING THE PRODUCTS IN THIS MANUAL ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE. ALL STATEMENTS,
INFORMATION, AND RECOMMENDATIONS IN THIS MANUAL ARE BELIEVED TO BE ACCURATE BUT ARE PRESENTED WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. USERS MUST TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR APPLICATION OF ANY PRODUCTS.

THE SOFTWARE LICENSE AND LIMITED WARRANTY FOR THE ACCOMPANYING PRODUCT ARE SET FORTH IN THE INFORMATION PACKET THAT SHIPPED WITH
THE PRODUCT AND ARE INCORPORATED HEREIN BY THIS REFERENCE. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO LOCATE THE SOFTWARE LICENSE OR LIMITED WARRANTY,
CONTACT YOUR CISCO REPRESENTATIVE FOR A COPY.

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LIMITATION, LOST PROFITS OR LOSS OR DAMAGE TO DATA ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THIS MANUAL, EVEN IF CISCO OR ITS SUPPLIERS
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Any Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and phone numbers used in this document are not intended to be actual addresses and phone numbers. Any examples, command display output, network
topology diagrams, and other figures included in the document are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any use of actual IP addresses or phone numbers in illustrative content is unintentional
and coincidental.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: http://
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relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R)

© 2015 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.


CONTENTS

Preface Preface ix
Change History ix
About This Guide x
Audience x
Related Documents x
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request xi
Documentation Feedback xi

CHAPTER 1 About Unified CCX 1


Overview 1
Unified CCX Components 2
New Features 2
Packaging and Licensing Scheme 3
Desktops 4
Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop Features 5
Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent Features 8
Cisco Finesse Supervisor Desktop Features 9
Inbound Voice 10
IVR Ports 12
Inbound Voice Packaged Components 13
Automatic Call Distribution 13
Interactive Voice Response 15
Computer Telephony Integration 20
Outbound Preview Dialer 22
Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer 24
Web Chat 26
Web Chat Components 26

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Web Chat Features 27


Agent Email 28
Agent Email Components 29
Agent Email Features 29
Reporting 30
Cisco Finesse Recording 31
Quality Management and Compliance Recording 32
Workforce Management 33

CHAPTER 2 Overview 35
Unified CCX General Rules for Design 37
Single-Server Non-High Availability Deployment Model 38
Two-Server High Availability Deployment Model 38
Unified CCX High Availability over LAN 39
Unified CCX High Availability over WAN 39
Network Requirements 40
Delay 40
Bandwidth 41
Quality of Service 43
Deployment Considerations 43
Other Design Considerations 44
Multiple Cisco Unified CCX Clusters Integrated with a Single Cisco Unified Communications
Manager Cluster 45
Other Deployment Models 46
Other Unified Communications Integration 46

CHAPTER 3 Features 47
Cisco Finesse 47
Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent 52
Inbound Voice 52
Codec Support 52
Unified CCX Outbound Dialer 53
High Level Components 54
Functional Description 55
Outbound Preview 55

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Outbound IVR and Agent 55


High Availability for Outbound Dialer 56
Scalability 56
Call Flow Description 57
Direct Preview Mode 57
IVR Mode 58
Deployment Guidelines 58
Home Agent with Extend and Connect 59
Deployment Guidelines 63
Remote Agent Over Broadband 63
Unified CCX Web Chat 63
Deployment Scenario 1: Customer Web Site in Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) 64
Deployment Scenario 2: Customer Web Site in Public Cloud or Domain 65
Unified CCX Finesse Agent Email 65
Reporting 67
Unified Intelligence Center 67
Unified Intelligence Center Historical reports 67
Unified Intelligence Center Live Data reports 69
Finesse Reports 71
Wallboards 71
Configuration APIs 72
Remote Expert Mobile 72
Post Call Treatment 72
Purge Enhancement 72
Security 72
Caller ID Support 73
E.164 Support 73
Context Service 74

CHAPTER 4 Design Considerations 75


Principal Design Considerations for Call Center Sizing 76
Preliminary Information Requirements 77
Terminology 78
Effect of Performance Criteria on Unified CCX Server 79
Effect of Performance Criteria 79

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Impact of Performance Criteria on the Unified CM Servers 79


Estimating Bandwidth Consumption 80
Remote Agent Traffic Profile 80
IP Call Bandwidth Usage 81
Bandwidth Available for Monitoring and Recording 83
Web Chat Feature 84
Finesse Agent Email Feature 86
Security 91
Corporate Data Access 92
QoS and Call Admission Control 92
Unified CCX and Application-Related Traffic 93
CAC and RSVP 94
Bandwidth Security and QoS Considerations for Unified Intelligence Center 96
Context Service Performance Considerations 96
Reporting Scaling Considerations 96
Server Capacities and Limits 97
Load Balancing for Finesse 101
IPv6 Support 102
Unified CCX Software Compatibility 102
Cisco Unified CCX Disk Space Usage 102
Deployment Guidelines for Agent Phones that Support G.722 or iLBC 103

APPENDIX A Unified CCX Failover 105


Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) 105
Interactive Voice Response 106
Unified CCX Outbound Dialer 106
Engine Redundancy 107
When WAN Link Between Data Centers is Down—Island Mode 107
When the Master Engine is Down 108
When WAN Link and One of the Engines is Down 108
Unified CCX Failover 108
Cisco Finesse Failover 109
Finesse IP Phone Agent Failure Behavior 110
Cisco Unified Intelligence Center 110
Standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center 110

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Web Chat 111

APPENDIX B References 113


References 113

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viii
Preface
• Change History, page ix
• About This Guide, page x
• Audience, page x
• Related Documents, page x
• Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request, page xi
• Documentation Feedback, page xi

Change History
Change See Date
Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent, on Initial release of document for
page 52 11.0(1)

Cisco Finesse Recording Cisco Finesse Recording, on page Initial release of document for
31 11.0(1)

Standalone Cisco Unified Standalone Cisco Unified Initial release of document for
Intelligence Center Intelligence Center , on page 110 11.0(1)

Remote Expert Mobile Remote Expert Mobile, on page Initial release of document for
72 11.0(1)

Reporting Scaling Considerations Reporting Scaling Considerations, Initial release of document for
on page 96 11.0(1)

Post Call Treatment Post Call Treatment, on page 72 Initial release of document for
11.0(1)

Purge Enhancement Purge Enhancement, on page 72 Initial release of document for


11.0(1)

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Preface
About This Guide

About This Guide


This guide provides design considerations and guidelines for deploying Cisco Unified Contact Center Express
(Unified CCX). This guide assumes that you are familiar with basic contact center terms and concepts.
Successful deployment of Unified CCX also requires familiarity with the information presented in the Cisco
Collaboration Systems Solution Reference Network Designs (SRND).

Audience
This guide is primarily for contact center designers and system administrators.

Related Documents
Document or Resource Link
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Documentation http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/
Guide ps1846/products_documentation_roadmaps_list.html

cisco.com site for Unified CCX documentation http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/


ps1846/tsd_products_support_series_home.html

Troubleshooting tips for Unified CCX http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Troubleshooting_


Unified_Contact_Center_Express

Virtualization for Unified CCX http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Virtualization_for_


Cisco_Unified_Contact_Center_Express

cisco.com site for Unified Intelligence Center http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9755/tsd_


documentation products_support_series_home.html

cisco.com site for Cisco Finesse documentation http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11324/tsd_


products_support_series_home.html

cisco.com site for Cisco SocialMiner documentation http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/


customer-collaboration/socialminer/
tsd-products-support-series-home.html

cisco.com site for Cisco Mediasense documentation http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/


customer-collaboration/mediasense/
tsd-products-support-series-home.html

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Preface
Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request

Obtaining Documentation and Submitting a Service Request


For information on obtaining documentation, using the Cisco Bug Search Tool (BST), submitting a service
request, and gathering additional information, see What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, at: http://
www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/general/whatsnew/whatsnew.html.
Subscribe to What's New in Cisco Product Documentation, which lists all new and revised Cisco technical
documentation as an RSS feed and delivers content directly to your desktop using a reader application. The
RSS feeds are a free service.

Documentation Feedback
To provide your feedback for this document, send an email to:
contactcenterproducts_docfeedback@cisco.com

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Documentation Feedback

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CHAPTER 1
About Unified CCX
• Overview, page 1
• Unified CCX Components, page 2
• New Features, page 2
• Packaging and Licensing Scheme, page 3

Overview
Cisco Unified Contact Center Express provides a secure, highly available, and easy to deploy customer
interaction management solution for up to 400 agents. This integrated “contact center in a box” is intended
for both formal and informal contact centers.
Unified CCX provides options to address multiple contact center functional areas such as:
• Inbound voice
• Outbound campaign
• Agent email
• Inbound web chat

Other components included are:


• Web-based reports
• SocialMiner user licenses for social forum activity monitoring and follow-up

Note The SocialMiner server license is not included.

• Browser-based Cisco Finesse Desktops


• Finesse IP Phone Agent (IPPA) for support of phone-based agents (with fewer features)

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Unified CCX Components

You can deploy these options on Cisco Unified Computing Systems (UCSs) or any other equivalent
specification-based third-party virtual servers with the supported deployment models. For more information,
see the Virtualization DocWiki located here:
http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Virtualization_for_Cisco_Unified_Contact_Center_Express

Unified CCX Components


The following diagram depicts the components of Unified CCX:

Figure 1: Unified CCX Components

New Features
Context Service
Cisco Context Service is a cloud-based omnichannel solution for Cisco Contact Center Express.

Removal of Cisco Agent Desktop


Unified CCX 11.0(1) supports only Cisco Finesse as the agent desktop.

Historical Reports
The following Historical Reports have been enhanced with the Discard Email feature included:

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Available Reports Description


Email Agent Activity Report Presents statistics of the email-enabled agents on a per day
basis.

Email Contact Detail Report Presents information about each email contact that is handled
by the agent.

Email CSQ Activity Report Presents email activity statistics of agents in a Contact Service
Queue (CSQ) on a per day basis.

Email Traffic Analysis Report Gives the count of email messages that are received for each
CSQ.

Other Reporting Enhancements


These are the following reporting enhancements done in Unified CCX 11.0(1):
• Improved user experience.
• Enhancement of the reporting gadgets on Finesse.

Cisco Finesse related Enhancements


The following Cisco Finesse enhancements are available in the Unified CCX 11.0(1):
• Agent accessibility.
• Finesse IP Phone Agent.
• Increased the number of wrap-up codes.
• Increased number of phone books.
• Increased number of contacts.
• Enhancements in Call Variable Layout.
• Post Call Treatment

System Enhancement
The following is a system enhancement available in the Unified CCX 11.0(1):
• Purge enhancement.

Packaging and Licensing Scheme


Unified CCX is available in three different packages: Standard, Enhanced, and Premium. Different packages
provide varying levels of customer interaction management channel options and capability within a contact
channel. For more detailed information, refer to product data sheets, feature guides, and end user documentation
for each type of Unified CCX customer contact interaction management at the following URL:

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Desktops

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/index.html
Unified CCX deployments must have all product components and optional features of the same package type.
Mixing components or options from different license packages is not supported.

Licensing for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express


The licensing for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express varies for each feature. Licenses are either concurrent
or named-user licenses. All packaging depends on the number of users with the exception of the Inbound
Voice High Availability server software option.
Concurrent licenses apply to logged in users. Different individuals may share a concurrent license as long as
only one of them is logged in. For example, Company A has 300 unique users that work in 3 shifts. Each shift
has 100 logged in users. Company A needs to purchase only 100 concurrent user licenses.
Named licenses apply to unique individual users regardless of their logged in status. Company B has 300
unique users that work in 3 shifts and each needs access to the licensed option. Each shift has 100 logged in
users. Company B must purchase 300 named licenses.

Table 1: Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Licensing and Packaging

Feature Licensing and Packaging


Inbound Voice Non-High Availability Concurrent license available with Standard, Enhanced,
and Premium
Inbound Voice High Availability Server software option available with Enhanced, and
Premium
Preview Outbound Concurrent license included with Premium
Progressive and Predictive IVR Outbound, Optional license available with Premium
Progressive and Predictive Agent Outbound
Compliance Recording Optional license available with Standard, Enhanced,
and Premium
Quality Management Optional license available with Premium and
Enhanced
Advanced Quality Management Optional license available with Premium and
Enhanced
Workforce Management Optional license available with Premium and
Enhanced
Call Recording with MediaSense Concurrent license optionally available with Premium
and Enhanced

Desktops
Cisco Finesse provides the following desktops:
• Cisco Finesse agent desktop and IP Phone Agent (IPPA) for agent use.

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• Cisco Finesse supervisor desktop for supervisor use.


• Cisco Finesse administrator console for administrator use.

Cisco Finesse desktop services are available with the following Unified CCX packages:

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Cisco Finesse agent and supervisor desktops Included Included Not Included

Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent Included Included Included

Cisco Finesse administrator console Included Included Included

Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop Features


The following table describes the Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop features that are available in each Unified
CCX package.

Table 2: Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop Features Available in Each Unified CCX Package

Feature Premium Enhanced


Agent State Control. From the agent desktop, agents log in, Included Included
log out, and make themselves ready and not ready.

Call Control. From the agent desktop, agents can answer, Included Included
release, hold, retrieve, conference, and consult transfer the calls.
Blind transfer is not supported.
For example, to answer a call, the agent can simply pick up the
phone handset. The Unified CCX software ensures that the
current call state for the phone is kept in synch.

Dynamic Regrouping. Change of agent association with a Included Included


resource group is applied immediately.

Live Data Gadgets. Agents have access to Live Data Gadgets Included Included
for themselves and the queues to which they are associated. For
example, from the Finesse Gadgets, agents can see how many
calls they have handled today and how many calls are currently
in queue for their CSQ.

Reason Codes. Agents can be configured to enter reason codes Included Included
for Not Ready and Logout.

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Feature Premium Enhanced


Basic CTI. The agent desktop supports one variable in the header Included Included
of the call control gadget and up to a total of 20 variables in two
columns below the header (up to 10 in each column). You can
use call variables, Extended Call Context (ECC) variables, or
the following Outbound Option ECC variables:
• BACampaign
• BAAccountNumber
• BAResponse
• BAStatus
• BADialedListID
• BATimeZone
• BABuddyName

Telephony Support. Finesse can be deployed with select Cisco Included Included
Unified IP Phone models, as described in Cisco Unified CCX
Software and Hardware Compatibility Guide, located at http://
docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_
CCX. However, there are different features available on different
phones.
An agent ACD (Unified CCX) extension cannot be shared across
multiple devices. It is valid only with a single line.
You can set the agent ACD extension for Call Forward No
Answer (to voicemail or any other endpoint) as long as the value
for the Ring No Answer timer on that device (or in Cisco Unified
Communications Manager if the default is chosen) is less than
the value for the Select Resource Timeout in the Select Resource
step of the script.
Unified CCX monitors and reports on activities for the first four
extensions on a phone, including non-ACD lines.
Agents are associated with a specific Cisco Unified
Communications Manager extension (directory number).

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Feature Premium Enhanced


Hot Desking. Hot desking allows agents to log in using Finesse Included Included
and any Cisco Unified IP Phone that is registered with the same
Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster. This capability
allows multiple agents to use the same phone, but only one at a
time. For example, different agents on different shifts may use
the same workstation and phone.
Extension Mobility brings a user-specific phone profile
(including configured extensions for that user) to the phone being
logged in from. After logging in to Cisco Unified
Communications Manager with Extension Mobility, agents can
log in to Unified CCX using Finesse.

Desktop Workflows. The workflows allow to automate common Included Included


repetitive agent tasks. A workflow has a unique name and a
helpful description. Use the Manage Workflows and Manage
Workflow Actions gadgets to view, add, edit, or delete workflows
and workflow actions. All workflows are team-level workflows.
You cannot create a global workflow. If you need a global
workflow, create a team workflow and assign it to all teams.

Application Integration - HTTP. Finesse can be configured Included Included


using desktop workflows to allow call data to be passed to other
desktop applications (for example, CRM applications) for an
application window. Passing data to other applications is
performed through HTTP put/get commands that are then
associated with specific call events such as call ringing. No
programming is required to develop a screen pop. Application
integration can also be done upon call release to pop open a
wrap-up application on the agent workstation.

Workflow-Initiated Call Recording. Finesse can be configured Included Included


to automatically start recording on calls that meet conditions
defined in the application script and voice contact workflow.

Automatic Failover. Upon failure of the active Unified CCX Optional with HA Optional with HA
server, Finesse will automatically log agents back in on the license. license.
standby server, and the agent will be placed into a Not Ready
state. Upon failure of the active Unified CCX server, active calls
on agents phones will survive. However, the call duration and
other information that is associated with the call in the historical
reporting database may be affected. Historical reports generated
for time periods in which a failover occurred will have missing
or incorrect data. It will be discernable from the report that a
failover occurred.

Wrap-Up Codes. The wrap-up code selection is available to Included Included


the agent.

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Feature Premium Enhanced


Agent Email. Queues and routes email messages to staffed and Included Not available
skilled agents, helps the agent to respond easily, and provides a
collection of historical reports that help measure email
performance accurately.

Web Chat . The web chat with premium provides the facility Included Not available
for customers to initiate a chat session with the agent.

Workforce Optimization. Cisco Unified Workforce Optional with Optional with


Optimization (WFO) for Unified CCX is a full-featured solution Workforce Workforce
for optimizing performance and quality and is an integral Optimization user Optimization user
component of the Cisco Unified Communications System. The license license
WFO suite provides two solutions: Workforce Management
(WFM) and Call Recording and Quality Management (QM).
Outbound Preview Dialer. Finesse includes buttons to control Included Not available
an agent response to an outbound contact offering by the system.
If the agent clicks the Accept button, the system places the
outbound call to the customer from the agent phone.

Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent Features


The following table describes the IP Phone Agent (IPPA) features that are available in each Cisco Unified
CCX package.

Table 3: IPPA Features Available in Each Cisco Unified CCX Package

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Agent State Control. From the IPPA XML application, Included Included Included
agents log in, log out, and make themselves ready or not
ready.

Call Control. The Cisco Unified IP Phone provides call Included Included Included
control.

Dynamic Regrouping. Change of agent association with Included Included Included


a resource group is applied immediately.

Reason Codes. Agents can be configured to enter reason Included Included Included
codes for Not Ready and Logout.

Basic CTI. IPPA allows for call data to be popped onto Included Included Included
the IP Phone display upon call ringing.

Telephony Support. IPPA can be run from any phone that Included Included Included
supports an XML client.

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Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Hot Desking. Hot desking allows agents to log in using Included Included Included
any Cisco Unified IP Phone that is registered with the same
Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster. Agents
using Cisco IP Communicator can also use Extension
Mobility. This capability allows multiple agents to use the
same phone, but only one at a time. For example, different
agents on different shifts may use the same workstation
and phone.
Extension Mobility brings a user-specific phone profile
(including configured extensions for that user) to the phone
being logged in from. After logging in to Cisco Unified
Communications Manager with Extension Mobility, agents
can log in to Cisco Unified CCX using Finesse.

Cisco Finesse Supervisor Desktop Features


The following table lists the Cisco Finesse Supervisor Desktop features that are available in each Cisco Unified
CCX package.

Table 4: Cisco Finesse Supervisor Desktop Features Available in Each Cisco Unified CCX Package

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


View / Change Agent State. Supervisors can view the Included Included Not available
current state of all agents that are part of their team. The
supervisor desktop allows the supervisors to change an
agent state to Ready, Not Ready, or Logout.

Live Data Gadgets. Supervisors can view statistics of all Included Included Not available
agents and queues that are associated with their team.

Silent Monitoring. Supervisors can silently monitor agent Included Included Not available
calls. Supervisor can only monitor one agent at a time. To
monitor another agent, supervisor must end the silent
monitoring call, and then select a new agent who is in
Talking state.

Barge-in. Supervisors can barge in on an agent call that Included Included Not available
they are silently monitoring. The Barge-in feature brings
the supervisor, the agent, and the caller into a three-way
conference. The agent is aware when the supervisor barges
in. Barge-in is supported with Finesse using supported
phones, or IPPA.

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Intercept. Supervisors can intercept an agent call. The Included Included Not available
intercept feature transfers the call to the supervisor and the
agent is available to take another call. Intercept is supported
with Finesse using supported phones, or IPPA.

Search and Play Gadget. Cisco MediaSense provides Included Included Not available
Search and Play gadget, a web interface, which allows to
search and filter active and completed call recordings.

Automatic Failover and Re-login. Upon Cisco Unified Included Included Not available
CCX Engine failover, Finesse automatically fails over to
the standby Unified CCX Engine. The supervisor is logged
in again and set to “Not Ready” state, but the call will
continue to progress.

Inbound Voice
Cisco Unified CCX Standard, Enhanced, and Premium each provide varying levels of inbound voice ACD,
IVR, CTI, agent and supervisor desktops, desktop administration, real-time and historical reporting, and
web-based administration features.
Each user license is for a concurrent user. For example, a contact center with three shifts of 100 agents and
supervisors requires 100 concurrent user licenses. Each shift of 100 users would reuse these licenses during
their shifts.
The following table lists the inbound voice licensed components:

Table 5: Inbound Voice Licensed Components

License Premium Enhanced Standard


Concurrent inbound voice seat with IPPA Yes Yes Yes
Each concurrent inbound voice user (agent or supervisor)
requires a concurrent seat license. Each quantity one seat
license provides Quantity one Cisco IP Phone Agent
(IPPA).

Concurrent inbound voice seat with Finesse Desktop Yes Yes Yes
Each concurrent inbound voice user (agent or supervisor)
requires a concurrent seat license.

Basic Prompt and Collect IVR port Yes Yes Yes

Advanced IVR port Yes Not available Not available

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Inbound Voice

License Premium Enhanced Standard


High Availability (HA) option Yes Yes Not available
HA provides licensing for mirrored, warm standby server
software.

The following table lists the inbound voice features:

Table 6: Inbound Voice Features

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


General System Features with Server Software

Operating systems supported Cisco Voice Cisco Voice Cisco Voice


Operating Operating Operating
System System System

Inbound voice redundancy support High-availability High-availability Not available


cluster over cluster over
the WAN with the WAN with
automatic automatic
failover failover

Maximum number of ACD lines per agent 1 1 1

Maximum number of secondary lines with Finesse 3 3 3

Call conferencing Included Included Included

Agent inter-dialing support Included Included Included

Direct-outward-dialing (DOD) support Included Included Included

Inbound Voice Seats

Maximum number of configurable inbound agents 2000 2000 2000


supported

Maximum number of active inbound agents supported 400 400 400


(including supervisor seats)

Maximum number of inbound supervisor positions 42 42 42


supported

Inbound seat license type Concurrent Concurrent Concurrent


user user user

Integrated ACD Features with Server Software

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Custom scripting with Cisco Unified Contact Center Included Included Included
Express Drag and Drop Editor

Maximum number of agent groups supported 150 150 150

Maximum number of agents per team 50 50 50

Automatic Number Identification (ANI) support Included Included Included

Dialed Number Identification Service (DNIS) support Included Included Included

Route on Skill Included Included Included

Route on Skill competency Included Included Included

Conditional routing (time of day, day of week, and custom Included Included Included
variables)

Custom routing based on data from database access (for Included Not available Not available
example, data-directed priority routing)

Dynamic priority queuing Included Included Not available

Maximum number of definable skill groups 150 150 150

Maximum number of skills per agent 50 50 50

Maximum number of routing programs Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited

Integrated Recording

Workflow-based recording with Cisco Finesse Available with Available with Not available
MediaSense or MediaSense or
WFO license WFO license

IVR Ports
IVR ports are packaged as either Basic or Advanced IVR ports.
• Basic IVR ports licensing—Basic IVR ports are not licensed. You must use the Cisco Unified
Communications Sizing Tool to determine the maximum number of Basic IVR ports that are supported
on a per-configuration basis.
• Advanced IVR ports licensing— Advanced IVR ports are licensed on a per-inbound voice seat basis
and are available only with the Premium package. Each inbound voice seat provides two Advanced IVR
port licenses. For example, a 100-seat inbound voice deployment provides 200 Advanced IVR port
licenses. Advanced IVR port licenses counts are checked at run-time. In the example given here, the

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Inbound Voice

201st simultaneously active request for an Advanced IVR port to handle an incoming call would be
denied. Deployments that require additional advanced IVR ports need to purchase add-on Unified CCX
Premium seats. Each Premium seat provides two advanced IVR ports.

Note The maximum number of IVR ports is limited by the maximum number supported for
a given OVA profile. For more information, see Virtualization for Cisco Unified Contact
Center Express available at:

http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Virtualization_for_Cisco_Unified_Contact_Center_Express

Inbound Voice Packaged Components


The following sections describe the primary components that are provided with inbound voice. These sections
provide high-level descriptions of the features and functions provided for these components. For more specific
information, see the Cisco Unified CCX user documentation.

Automatic Call Distribution


The following table describes the Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) features that are available in each Unified
CCX package.

Table 7: ACD Features Available in Each Unified CCX Package

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Conditional Routing. Unified CCX supports routing Included Included Included
based on caller input to menus, real-time queue
statistics, time of day, day of week, ANI, dialed
number, and processing of data from XML text files.

Agent Selection. Unified CCX supports the longest Included Included Included
available, linear, most handled contacts, the shortest
average handle time, and circular agent selection
algorithms. With Basic ACD functionality, agents
are associated with one resource group only.

Customizable Queuing Announcements. Unified Included Included Included


CCX supports the playing of customizable queuing
announcements based on the skill group that the call
is being queued to, including announcements related
to position in queue and expected delay.

Re-route on Ring No Answer. If the selected agent Included Included Included


does not answer within the allowed time limit, the
caller retains the position in queue. Any screen pop
data is also preserved.

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Data driven routing for HTML and XML data Included Included Included
sources. The ability to use data obtained from HTML
or XML documents to make routing decisions. XML
document processing can also be used as a data store
to access system-wide static data, such as a list of
holidays, hours of operation, or a short list of hot
customer accounts.

Agent Skill and Competency-Based Routing. Included Included Included


Agents can be configured with specific number of
skills, each with up to 10 different competency levels.
Contact Service Queues (also known as skill groups)
can be configured as requiring up to specific number
of skills, each with up to 10 minimum skill
competency levels. The Unified CCX routing logic
then matches the caller and contact requirements with
agent skills to find the optimum match using one of
the following agent selection criteria:
• Longest available, most handled contacts, or
shortest average handle time
• Most skilled, most skilled by weight, or most
skilled by order
• Least skilled, least skilled by weight, or least
skilled by order

High Availability Failover. With HA failure of the Optional with Optional with Not available
active server can be detected and the ACD subsystem HA license HA license
can automatically fail over from the active to the
standby server.

Dynamic Re-skilling by Administrator or Included Included Included


Supervisor. Changes to CSQ skills and competencies
and agent skills and competencies are applied
immediately.

Prioritized Queuing. Up to 10 levels of customer Included Included Not available


contacts can be prioritized based on call or customer
data, and calls may be moved within or among queues
under workflow control using priority information.

Agent Routing. Unified CCX routing applications Included Included Not available
can select a specific agent if that agent is in Ready
state. (Queuing on a per agent basis is not supported.)

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Data-driven routing based on JDBC database Included Not available Not available
sources via SQL. The ability to use data obtained
from a JDBC compatible database via a SQL query
to make routing decisions.

Wrap-Up and Work Modes. After call completion, Included Included Not available
an agent can be configured to be automatically placed
into Work state, on a per CSQ basis. The agent can
also choose to enter work state if that option is
provided by the agent desktop administrator. A
wrap-up timer is also configurable on a per CSQ
basis.

Wrap-Up Codes. Agents may select administratively Included Included Not available
defined wrap up codes.

Interactive Voice Response


The following table describes the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) features that are available in each Unified
CCX package.

Table 8: IVR Features Available in Each Unified CCX Package

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard IVR License


Basic Prompt and Collect IVR. Basic Included as a Included Included Included
IVR ports provide a queue point, custom part of advanced
messaging and prompting, caller input IVR port
collection, and processing via DTMF
decoding. Decoded DTMF input may
be used for both routing and screen pop
purposes. Basic call controls such as
terminate, transfer, and place call are
also supported as part of the basic IVR
functionality.
Note Basic IVR port and Advanced
IVR port cannot be mixed in
the same configuration.
Advanced IVR port includes
all features available in Basic
IVR port.

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard IVR License


High Availability Failover. With HA, Optional with Optional with Not available Optional with
failure of the active server can be HA license HA license HA license
detected and the IVR subsystem can
automatically fail over from the active
to the standby server. All IVR functions
will be restored on the standby server.
Note All calls in queue and calls
receiving IVR call treatment
will be lost. Calls already
transferred to the agent will be
preserved.
Advanced IVR Port Database Included Not available Not available Included
Integration. The Unified CCX server
can interoperate with any
JDBC-compliant database. Databases
tested and supported by Cisco are listed
in Cisco Unified CCX Software and
Hardware Compatibility Guide, which
is available at:
http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/
Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_
CCX.
Data retrieved from databases can be
used with the conditional routing
capabilities to provide customer
profile-based routing and queuing.
Database integration also provides the
ability to offer complete self-service
applications to callers. Database views
are not supported using the Unified CCX
Editor database steps, but database views
can be accessed using Voice XML or
Java logic modules.

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard IVR License


Advanced IVR Ports HTTP Triggers Included Not available Not available Included
(the web analog to Unified CM
Telephony) to invoke and run a
workflow. HTTP triggers enable a
Unified CCX to receive a customer
contact request through an HTTP
request. This approach allows web users
to be offered service through a “click to
talk to an agent” button. Information
collected using the web (a customer call
back number, account number, shopping
cart content, and so on) can be passed
to the Unified CCX script to allow
customer profile-based routing and a
data-rich window. These contacts can
be prioritized and routed using the same
methods available to normal inbound
voice callers.

Advanced IVR Port SMTP outbound Included Not available Not available Included
mail subsystem that may be used at
run time under workflow control to
send an email message. Third-party
paging or fax products that accept an
incoming email message to invoke a
page or fax service may use this
subsystem to provide real-time paging
and fax responses in addition to email
responses.

Advanced IVR Port Voice XML 2.0 Included Not available Not available Included
Support. Unified CCX supports
executing application logic developed
with the Voice XML (VXML) standard.
VXML is required for certain complex
grammar ASR and TTS interactions and
is optional for a DTMF or simple ASR
or TTS voice interaction service. VXML
allows organizations to reuse application
logic from other applications, such as a
transaction server to a mainframe
database.
Note 1 Unified CCX uses MRCP
v1 for communicating with
third-party ASR-TTS
servers.
2 The supported ASR-TTS
server includes Nuance.

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard IVR License


Advanced IVR Port Java Support. Included Not available Not available Included
The Unified CCX server can support the
defined logic using Java. Java support
allows the reuse of logic from the
existing web and Java applications.

Advanced IVR Port Automatic Speech Optional with Not available Not available Optional with
Recognition via MRCP. ASR provides purchase of purchase of
the ability to use natural human speech compatible ASR compatible
to replace DTMF keypad presses as a product ASR product
way to interact with IVR applications.

Advanced IVR Port Text to Speech Optional with Not available Not available Optional with
via MRCP. TTS provides the ability to purchase of purchase of
use flat text files as input to a compatible TTS compatible
computer-generated speech engine. TTS product TTS product
can replace prerecorded human speech
in IVR applications.

Advanced IVR Port Remote Silent Included Not available Not available Not applicable
Monitoring. Provides a mechanism for
silent monitoring of calls using an IP
phone or a PSTN phone. This form of
silent monitoring does not require a CSD
application to be running but does
require a seat license for any supervisor
engaged in remote silent monitoring.
Remote silent monitoring also does not
require any data network connectivity
and is ideally suited for management of
outsourced customers of a call center
service provider. The agent is unaware
of being monitored using remote silent
monitoring.
Note This operation is not supported
in Finesse deployments.
General IVR Features
Play messages to callers: Music on hold Included Included Included Included
through Cisco through Cisco through Cisco through Cisco
Unified Unified Unified Unified
Communications Communications Communications Communications
Manager Music Manager Manager Manager
on Hold server Music on Music on Hold Music on Hold
or .wav file Hold server or server or .wav server or .wav
.wav file file file

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Inbound Voice

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard IVR License


Play messages to callers: Prompts Included Included Included Included
through .wav through .wav through .wav through .wav
file file file file

Play messages to callers: Combine Included and Included and Included and Included and
prompts, music, and messages fully fully fully fully
customizable customizable customizable customizable

Capture and process caller DTMF input Included Included Included Included

Automated-Attendant support Included and Included and Included and Included


fully fully fully
customizable customizable customizable

Database integration Included Not available Not available Included

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Optional Not available Not available Through
through Media Media
Resource Resource
Control Protocol Control
(MRCP) Protocol
(MRCP)

Text to Speech (TTS) Optional Not available Not available Optional


through MRCP through MRCP

Real-time notification services (email; Included Not available Not available Included
support for paging and fax) (paging and fax (paging and
require fax require
integration with integration
third-party with
services) third-party
services)

VoiceXML for ASR, TTS, and DTMF Included Not available Not available Included

Read data from HTTP/S and XML pages Included Included Included Included

Run workflows through HTTP/S request Included Not available Not available Included

Integrated self-service application Included Not available Not available Included


support

Retrieve XML data using HTTP/S Included Not available Not available Included
mechanism

Retrieve XML/JSON based data using Included Not available Not available Included
generic REST API call

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Inbound Voice

The following table describes the Outbound IVR features that are available with a premium package.

Table 9: Outbound Features (IVR and Agent) Available with a Premium Package

Feature Premium
General System Features with Server Software

Hardware configuration Outbound (IVR and Agent) Dialer is


deployed co-loaded on the same virtual
machine (VM) as the inbound voice server.
CPA is performed on the compatible
external voice gateway.

Outbound IVR Ports and Agent Seats

Maximum number of Outbound IVR ports and Agent seats 150


supported

Outbound IVR Port license type Concurrent

Outbound Agent Seat license type Concurrent

Outbound IVR and Agent Features (Progressive and Predictive)

Maximum number of active outbound campaigns 15

Maximum number of active contacts per outbound campaign 10,000

Ability to automatically detect voice answer, answering machine, Included


fax/modem, busy and invalid numbers (available with all the
supported gateways)

Administration

Ability for administrator to create and configure campaigns Included

Ability for administrator to create non-North American area code Included


to time-zone mappings

The summary overview of system maximums for inbound and outbound voice in the tables are for reference
only.

Computer Telephony Integration


Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) refers to the ability to use data entered by the caller, ACD, IVR, or
other data sources to pop to the agent, to make routing decisions, or to use as a key to perform a data lookup
(for example, using a database access prior to popping to the agent, or to use in making routing decisions).

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Inbound Voice

CTI may also include the ability to invoke a third-party application and to pass data to that application as part
of the agent screen pop.
The following table lists the CTI features that are available in each Cisco Unified CCX package.

Table 10: CTI Features Available in each Cisco Unified CCX Package

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Basic CTI. Provides a Included Included Included
customizable enterprise
data window that is
popped on the agent
desktop upon call ringing.
Data in the enterprise data
window includes ANI,
dialed number, and any
caller input (account
number, order number,
case number, reason for
calling, and so on), and
details about how long the
caller interacted with the
IVR, how long the caller
waited in queue, and how
long the caller spent with
all other agents if this was
a transferred call.

Advanced CTI. Included. Included. Not available


Advanced CTI Premium package adds Enhanced package adds
functionality allows call support for using data support for using data
data to be passed to other from supported databases from XML data sources.
Windows-based desktop using workflow-based Database integration is
applications (for example, SQL queries not supported
CRM applications) for an
application screen pop on
ringing. Passing data to
other applications is
performed through
keystroke macros that are
then associated with
specific call events such
as call ringing or call
release. With keystroke
macros and HTTP put/get
commands, no
programming is required
to develop a screen pop
application.

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Outbound Preview Dialer

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Automatically start any Included Included Not available
Microsoft
Windows-compatible
application: Pass
initialization parameters

Populate data to any Included Included Not available


Microsoft
Windows-compatible
application

Populate data to any Included Not available Not available


browser-based application

Customer database Included Not available Not available


integration (JDBC)

Outbound Preview Dialer


The Outbound Preview Dialer provides campaign-based outbound preview dialer support. Each inbound
Premium seat provides one outbound seat. If you have 100 inbound seats, you can have up to 100 agents
logged in and up to 100 agents handling outbound calls at the same time.
The following table lists the Outbound Preview Dialer availability in Unified CCX premium package:

Table 11: Outbound Preview Dialer Availability for Unified CCX premium Package

Feature Premium
Preview Outbound Available

The following table describes the Outbound Preview Dialer features that are available in premium Unified
CCX package:

Note For the Outbound feature, the maximum number of campaigns supported is 15 and the maximum number
of supervisor positions supported is 42.

Table 12: Outbound Preview Dialer Features Available for Unified CCX premium Package

Premium Feature
General System Features with Server Software
Note These features are the same as for inbound voice with the exception of redundancy.

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Outbound Preview Dialer

Premium Feature
Hardware configuration Deploys and executes co-loaded
on the same virtual machine or
bare metal server as the inbound
voice server.

Outbound Voice Seats

Maximum number of configurable outbound agents supported Unlimited (no software


limitations)

Maximum number of active outbound agents supported 150

Outbound license type Concurrent user

Outbound Preview Dialer Features

Maximum number of active outbound campaigns 15

Maximum number of active contacts per outbound campaign 10,000

Integrated CTI and Screen Pop Features with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

Populates customer's name, account number, and phone number dialed Included

Cisco Finesse Features for Agent with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License
Workflow-based recording Included

Ability for supervisor to use Silent Monitor, Barge-In, and Intercept Included

Ability for agent to accept or reject outbound contact. Agent can reclassify Included
call to anyone of many call results, such as busy, fax, and answering
machine.

Cisco Finesse Features for Supervisor with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

Live Data Gadgets Included

Silent Monitor: Listen in on an agent's call Included

Barge-In: Join in on an agent's conversation Included

Intercept: Take a call from an agent Included

Record Optional with MediaSense,


Cisco WFO, or WFO Solutions
Plus

Integrated Historical Reporting with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

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Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer

Premium Feature
Preview Outbound Campaign Summary report Included

Preview Outbound Agent Detail Performance report Included

Administration

Campaign Management: Administrators can create and configure Included


campaigns. They can specify a daily time range during which outbound
calls are made and a set of CSQ to specify whose agents make the outbound
calls, They can also specify and import a list of customer contacts to be
called.

Area Code Management: Administrators can add mappings from area-code Included
to time zone for non-North American locations. This information is used
to determine the customer contact current time before placing an outbound
call.

Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer


The Unified CCX Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer provides campaign-based agent outbound
progressive and predictive dialer support. The number of agent seats depends on the number of outbound
licenses available. If you have 10 outbound licenses, you can have up to 10 concurrent agent seats to handle
outbound calls and 10 concurrent outbound IVR calls.
The following table lists the Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer feature that is available with the
premium package.

Table 13: Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer Available with Premium Package

Feature Premium
Progressive and Predictive Agent Outbound Optional with Outbound
License

The following table describes the Outbound Progressive and Predictive features that are available for the
Outbound License with the premium package.

Note For the Outbound feature, the maximum number of campaigns supported is 15 and the maximum number
of supervisor positions supported is 42.

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Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer

Table 14: Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer Availability with Premium Package

Feature Premium
General System Features with Server Software
Note These features are the same as for inbound voice with the exception of redundancy.

Hardware configuration Deploys and executes


co-loaded on the same
virtual machine as the
inbound voice server.

Outbound Voice Seats

Maximum number of active concurrent agents supported 150

Outbound license type Concurrent user

Outbound Progressive and Predictive Dialer Features

Maximum number of CSQs per outbound campaign 10

Maximum number of active contacts per outbound campaign 10,000

Cisco Finesse Features with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

Workflow-based recording Optional with Outbound


License

View agent activity in real time Optional with Outbound


License

Cisco Finesse Features for Supervisor with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

Silent Monitor: Listen in on an agent's call Optional with Outbound


License

Barge-In: Join in on an agent's call Optional with Outbound


License

Intercept: Take a call from an agent Optional with Outbound


License

Integrated Historical Reporting with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

Agent Outbound Campaign Summary Report Optional with Outbound


License

Agent Outbound CCDR Report Optional with Outbound


License

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Web Chat

Feature Premium
Agent Outbound Half Hourly Report Optional with Outbound
License

Outbound Agent Detail Performance Report Optional with Outbound


License

Integrated Live Data Reporting with Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Seat License

Agent Outbound Team Summary Report Optional with Outbound


License

Administration

Campaign Management: Administrators can create and configure campaigns Optional with Outbound
using AppAdmin web interface and REST APIs License

Web Chat
Unified CCX premium package provides the facility for customers to initiate a chat session with the agent.
State control is common for web chat and email.

Contact Channel Premium


Inbound Web Chat Included

Web Chat Components

Finesse Gadgets
Finesse agent desktop supports multisession chat and generation of reports. The following gadgets are available
when the administrator adds the gadgets to the desktop:
• Chat and Email Control gadget—Allows the agent to control the chat state and to accept incoming
customer chat requests.
• Manage Chat and Email gadget—Allows the agent to handle multiple chat sessions.

Chat Live Data and Historical Reports


Unified CCX provides chat-specific live data reports and historical reports. Historical reports are available
on the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center reporting application that is packaged with Unified CCX. Live data
reports are available in Finesse as gadgets if the administrator enables them.

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Web Chat

Web Chat Features


The following table describes the web chat features that are available in premium package.

Table 15: Web Chat Features Available in Premium Package

Feature Premium
Agent alias. Administrator can set an alias for chat agent. When the agent is on chat, Included
the alias of the agent is displayed to the customer.

Auto chat reject. If no agent is available, Web Chat rejects the chat request. Included

Chat timeouts. Session timeouts for chat inactivity and maximum wait period. Included

Audible alert. An alert is played when the agent receives a new chat request or when Included
there is a new message on an inactive chat session tab.

Multisession chat for agents. Agents can handle multiple chat sessions. The Included
administrator can set one to five sessions and the agent will be presented with set
number of sessions.

Predefined Responses. Administrator can configure up to 500 Predefined Responses Included


across chat and email. These Predefined Responses can be tagged Global or with up
to 10 CSQ tags.
Chat supports plain text only.

Chat transcript. Storage and retrieval of chat transcripts through Cisco SocialMiner, Included
and download of chat transcripts by end user as PDF.

Live Data and historical reports.

Supervisor reports. Team report for CSQ and agents. Agent statistics and CSQ Included
statistics for chat.

Integrated Web Chat General System Features with Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop

Multiple skills per chat agent. Included

Blended voice, chat, and email agents. Included and


configurable

Offer voice calls when on chat. Included and


configurable

Offer chat when on voice calls. Included and


configurable

Dedicated chat agents. Included and


configurable

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Agent Email

Feature Premium
Separate voice and non-voice state model . Included

Maximum number of concurrent web chat sessions. Depends on the OVA profile. Included
60 / 120 chat
sessions

Customer form generation and customization. Included

Agent skill and competency-based routing. You can configure 50 skills, each with Included
up to ten different competency levels. You can configure Contact Service Queues
(also known as skill groups) as requiring up to 50 skills, each with up to ten minimum
skill competency levels. The web chat routing logic then matches the contact problem
statement with agent skills to find the optimum match using one of the following agent
selection criteria:
• Longest available
• Most skilled

Dynamic reskilling by administrator. Changes to CSQ skills and competencies and Included
agent skills and competencies are applied immediately.

Conditional routing. Routing is based on a problem statement that is chosen by the Included
customer.

Agent selection. The longest available and most skilled agent selection algorithm. Included

Rerouting on chat no answer. If the allocated agent does not accept chat within the Included
allowed time limit, the contact is requeued and rerouted.

Customizable queuing messages. Customizable contact waiting message. Included

High Availability (HA) failover. With HA, failure of the active server can be detected Optional with HA
and the nonvoice subsystem can automatically fail over from the active to the standby License
server.

Agent Email
Unified CCX supports agent email with Finesse. Agent Email is available with Unified CCX premium package.

Feature Premium
Finesse Agent Email Included

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Agent Email

Agent Email Components


Finesse provides gadgets for handling email contacts. The following gadgets are available:
• Chat and Email Control Gadget—Allows the agent to control the chat and email state (non-voice state).
Emails are automatically accepted.
• Manage Chat and Email Gadget—Enables the agent to handle multiple email contacts.

Email Historical Reports


Unified CCX provides email-specific historical reports and you can access these reports on the Cisco Unified
Intelligence Center reporting application that is packaged with Unified CCX.

Agent Email Features


The following table describes the email features that are available with the premium package.

Table 16: Agent Email Features Available with Premium Package

Feature Premium
Auto accept email. Incoming emails are automatically presented to the agent without Included
any explicit accept (button click).

Visible alert. Email alert along with pending email count. Included

Email contact handling Agents can be configured to handle up to five email contacts. Included

Requeue email. Agent can re-queue email. Included

Reply To Header. If the Reply To header is present, the agent's response is sent to Included
that address. Otherwise, it uses the From address of that email to respond.

Save drafts. Agent can save email draft response and resume at a later time Included

Discard email. Discards email. Included

Predefined Responses. Administrator can configure up to 500 Predefined Responses Included


across chat and email. These Predefined Responses can be tagged Global or with up
to 10 CSQ tags.
Email supports rich text.

Attachments. Supported. Included


Attachment size limit
The agents can load up to 10 attachments with total size of maximum 5 MB.
This feature allows up to 10 MB of attachments with incoming email.

Historical Reports Included

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Reporting

Feature Premium
Integrated Agent Email General System Features with Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop

Microsoft Exchange. Not included; must


be purchased from
Microsoft vendor

Multiple email addresses. Assign one or more email addresses to a single Contact Included
Service Queue (CSQ)

Dedicated email agents. Included and


configurable

Fully integrated with Cisco Finesse agent desktop. Included

Separate voice and non-voice state model. Included

Blended voice, chat ,and email agents. Included

Email routing. Included


• Last Agent Email Routing where attempt is made to route an email to the last
agent who handled the previous leg.
• Skill and competency based routing which applies to new emails or when Last
Agent Email Routing expires.

Dynamic reskilling by administrator. Changes to CSQ skills and competencies and Included
agent skills and competencies are applied immediately. Emails currently being worked
by the agents are not affected.

Agent selection. The longest available or most skilled agent selection algorithm. Included

High Availability (HA) failover. HA is supported in Unified CCX. Upon Unified Optional with HA
CCX failover, all emails in the system are automatically requeued and rerouted. License

Reporting
Cisco Unified Intelligence Center is the web-based reporting platform that is packaged as part of the Cisco
Unified CCX. It is available with the following Unified CCX packages:

Feature Premium Enhanced Standard


Unified Intelligence Included Included Included
Center reporting

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Cisco Finesse Recording

Cisco Finesse Recording


The following recording options are available:
• Cisco Finesse workflow-based recording using MediaSense.
• Cisco Finesse workflow-based recording using WFO (Workforce Optimization).

Note While using the MediaSense recording option, you must purchase the Unified CCX recording license.
While using the WFO recording option, you must have the CR/QM/AQM licenses.

The following table details the various recording features that are supported based on the type of recording
options available:

Feature Recording using WFO Recording using Recording using


MediaSense MediaSense and WFO
Solutions Plus
applications
Audio Recording Supported Supported Supported

Video Recording Not Supported Supported Supported

On Demand Recording Supported Not Supported Supported

Quality Management Supported Not Applicable Supported

Advanced Quality Supported Not Applicable Supported


Management (with
Screen Recording)

Note The licenses required for the recording options mentioned in the above table are:
• For recording using WFO, WFO licenses on Unified CCX are required.
• For recording using MediaSense, licenses on Unified CCX for Workflow based recording and Native
MediaSense licenses for IPT recording are required.
• For recording using MediaSense and WFO Solutions Plus applications, licenses on Unified CCX
for Workflow based recording, Native MediaSense licenses for IPT recording and Solutions Plus
WFO licenses are required.

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About Unified CCX
Quality Management and Compliance Recording

Quality Management and Compliance Recording


Each user license is for a named (not concurrent) user. For example, a contact center with three shifts of 100
agents and supervisors needs 300 named user licenses. Each person in a shift of 100 users uses the license
associated with them during their shift.
Quality Management is licensed on a per named user basis and provides all the server software required with
the exception of the Windows operating system and database software for the QM server, which must be
purchased off the shelf.
The following table lists the license types and features available:

Table 17: License and Features

Feature Compliance Recording Quality Management Advanced QM


Compliance Recording Included Included Included

Endpoint Recording Included Included Included

Server Based Recording Included Included Included


(via SPAN port)

Network Based Included Included Included


Recording

Cisco CUBE Recording Included Included Included


(via SIP)

Network Recording (Built Included Included Included


In Bridge)

Mediasense Recording Included Included Included

Gateway Recording Included Included Included

Role-based Scoping Included Included Included

Users Synchronized with Included Included Included


UCCX

Finesse Recording Included Included Included


Controls - (Pause,
Resume, Delete)

Attach Custom Metadata Included Included Included

Role Based Dashboards Included Included Included

Exporting of Recordings Included Included Included

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Workforce Management

Feature Compliance Recording Quality Management Advanced QM


Monitoring and Included Included Included
Notification Service

Recording Monitoring Included Included Included


Dashboard

Reporting Included Included Included

Live Audio Monitoring Included Included Included

Quality Evaluation Not available Included Included

Evaluator Comments Not available Included Included

Screen Recording Not available Not available Included

Live Screen Monitoring Not available Not available Included

Workforce Management
Cisco Workforce Management allows supervisors and contact center managers to develop schedules for their
agents and manage key performance indicators and real-time adherence. Managers can create and manage
schedules for an unlimited number of sites, manage scheduling for offices spread out in different time zones,
and schedule alternative media sources seamlessly, including email. Cisco Workforce Management also allows
agents to view their schedules and performance metrics and request exceptions to those schedules, such as
schedule offers and trades and requesting time off. Cisco Workforce Management is available with Unified
CCX Enhanced and Premium licenses.
Each user license is for a configured (not concurrent) user. For example, a contact center with three shifts of
100 agents and supervisors needs 300 configured user licenses. Each person in a shift of 100 users uses the
license associated with them during their shift.
The following Workforce Management features are available in each Cisco Unified CCX package:
• Forecasting
• Multimedia Scheduling
• Intraday Management
• KPIs and Reporting
• Alerts
• Reporting
• Web Interface
• Desktop Integration

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Workforce Management

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CHAPTER 2
Overview
This chapter discusses the deployment models that are available for Unified CCX. Use the Cisco Unified
Communications Sizing Tool to help you determine the number and types of servers required for any supported
deployment model and call processing requirements. Before using that tool, it is necessary to have an
understanding of what deployment model you desire.
Cisco Unified Communication Manager (Unified CM) co-loaded with Unified CCX on the same Virtual
Machine (VM) is not supported.

Note Cisco Unified Intelligence Center and Cisco Finesse are deployed on the same Virtual Machine (VM)
with Unified CCX and supports all the Unified CCX deployment models.

The following table depicts the deployment models that are supported in Unified CCX. These models have
no bearing on which specific server model is used. The minimum server model required is identified by the
Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool. This chapter provides general rules for design and considerations
and limitations for each of these deployment models. This information allows an Unified CCX system planner
or designer to understand what other similar deployment models are supported and to understand how to
determine the best solution for a given set of requirements.

Table 18: Unified CCX Deployment Models

Unified CCX Deployment Model Unified CCX Components on Server Unified CCX Components on Server
1 2
Single-Server Non-High Engine, Database, Recording, —
Availability Deployment Monitoring components
Model—Unified Communication
Manager Integration

Two-Server High Availability Engine, Database, Recording, Engine, Database, Recording,


Deployment Model—Unified Monitoring components Monitoring components
Communication Manager
Integration

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Note Unified CCX deployment model integrated with Unified CME is not supported in 9.0(1) and higher
versions.

The following figure depicts the deployment when integrating Unified CCX with Unified Communications
Manager. In this deployment, optional Unified CCX components shown with an asterisk (*) can be added.
These components are:
• Cisco Unified Work Force Management and Cisco Unified Quality Manager.
• Cisco IM and Presence Server.
For more details about deploying the Presence Server, refer the Cisco Unified Communications SRND,
which is available at this URL:
http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd

Figure 2: Deployment Model of Unified CCX Integrated with Unified Communication Manager

Note ASR and TTS can be added in Unified CCX integrated with Unified Communication Manager. ASR and
TTS software is not provided by Cisco. This software must be purchased from other vendors. These
vendors can provide design and server sizing requirements for their software.

• Unified CCX General Rules for Design, page 37


• Single-Server Non-High Availability Deployment Model, page 38
• Two-Server High Availability Deployment Model, page 38
• Other Design Considerations, page 44
• Other Unified Communications Integration, page 46

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Unified CCX General Rules for Design

Unified CCX General Rules for Design


The following rules apply when designing a Unified CCX deployment:
• When deploying for high availability (HA), the Unified CCX servers can be located in the same campus
LAN to provide server redundancy. The Cisco Unified CCX servers can also be located in different sites
separated by WAN to provide spatial redundancy.

Note For HA over LAN deployment, heartbeats are sent every half a second and failover occurs if 5 consecutive
heartbeats are missed. For HA over WAN deployment, heartbeats are sent every second and failover
occurs if missing 10 consecutive heartbeats. These values are not configurable.

• You can locate the Unified Communications Manager servers that run CTI Managers with which Unified
CCX communicates in the same campus LAN. In case of Unified CCX servers that are deployed over
WAN, for better site redundancy, Cisco highly recommends that you deploy local Unified
Communications Manager server at both sites.
• If recording is going to be used for a high availability deployment, the Recording component must be
redundant.
• All agents for a Unified CCX deployment must be using phones that register to the same Unified CM
cluster. Calls can be received from devices and callers on another Unified CM cluster (using inter-cluster
trunks).
• High availability is not supported when Cisco Unified IP-IVR is deployed in a Unified CCE environment.
• Unified CCX software and database versions must be the same for both the master and standby nodes
in a high availability deployment.
• Different server models can be used in a high availability deployment with the following constraints.
◦The capacity of the subscriber HDD should be equal to or more than that of the publisher HDD.
◦In the case of different servers being used in a high availability deployment, the system capacity
is determined by the smaller of the two servers.

• Unified CCX solution works with a combination of software and hardware components, providing an
open and flexible environment for customers to execute complex scripts, custom codes, documents, and
so on. Overloading any of the software and hardware components such as virtual memory and CPU
could impact the solution performance. Review and optimize the scripts, custom codes and documents
before they are loaded to the production setup. Also constantly monitor the system component and
hardware attributes like disk space and CPU utilization.

When deploying Quality Management and Workforce Management with Unified CCX, consider the following
guidelines:
• Quality Management and Workforce Management must be installed on separate VM from each other
and from Unified CCX. No form of co-residency is supported in this release with any other software,
such as installing on Unified CCX or installing both Quality Management and Workforce Management
on the same VM.

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Single-Server Non-High Availability Deployment Model

• Unified CCX does not support the use of third party applications (for example, using TAPI) to control
its devices.
• For more deployment information about Workforce Management and Quality Management, refer to the
Cisco Workforce Optimization System Configuration Guide available at here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps8293/products_implementation_design_guides_list.html

Single-Server Non-High Availability Deployment Model


Unified CM integration with Unified CCX on a single server non-high availability is for small deployments.
This deployment model places a single instance of all the Unified CCX software components on the same
server and uses Informix Dynamic Server as the database server.
This deployment model allows the Unified CCX Engine to fail over to a backup CTI Manager if the primary
CTI Manager fails. CTI ports and CTI route points should be grouped into device pools that have the same
primary and secondary server list as those used for JTAPI communications with the CTI Managers.

Two-Server High Availability Deployment Model


This deployment model is for small-to medium-sized contact centers requiring high availability. This
deployment model incorporates redundant Unified CCX engine, database, recording, and monitoring
components using Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop.
Informix IDS replication is used to keep the databases synchronized.
This deployment model can support silent monitoring and recording for agents at any WAN-connected site
by using desktop monitoring. (Refer to the Cisco Unified CCX Software and Hardware Compatibility Guide
at http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_CCX for a list of phones that support
desktop monitoring). It can also support SPAN port monitoring for agents on the VLAN segment local to
Unified CCX server. This deployment model provides redundancy for both recording and silent monitoring
for all agents using desktop monitoring (regardless of location) or agents on the local VLAN using SPAN
port monitoring. Silent monitoring and recording is not possible for agents who are using the Cisco IP Phone
Agent at remote sites. Similarly, silent monitoring and recording is not possible for agents at remote sites who
are using phones that do not support desktop monitoring.
This deployment model allows either Unified CCX Engine component to fail over to a backup CTI Manager
if the primary server fails. CTI Ports and CTI Route Points should be grouped into device pools that have the
same primary and secondary server list as that used for JTAPI communications to the CTI Managers.

Note In HA deployments, historical data comes from the database located in the standby engine node. A higher
number of historical reporting sessions during operating hours is supported for HA deployments.

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Unified CCX High Availability over LAN

Unified CCX High Availability over LAN


Unified CCX supports high availability over LAN to provide redundancy over LAN. The following figure
depicts the deployment for Unified CCX high availability over LAN.

Figure 3: Unified CCX High Availability over LAN Deployment

Unified CCX High Availability over WAN


Unified CCX supports high availability over WAN to provide site redundancy. In this deployment, the Unified
CCX servers are located in two different sites across the WAN. Each site should have at least one Unified
CM server that is running CTI Manager with which Unified CCX communicates. Agents and supervisors can

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Unified CCX High Availability over WAN

be located in one of the sites where the Unified CCX server resides or in any other remote sites. The following
figure depicts the deployment for Unified CCX high availability over WAN.

Figure 4: Unified CCX High Availability over WAN Deployment

Network Requirements
When deploying Unified CCX HA over WAN, observe network requirements described in this section.

Delay
The maximum allowed round-trip time (RTT) between Unified CCX servers is 80 ms.

Note Do not use the ping utility on the Unified CCX server to verify RTT as it will not provide an accurate
result. The ping is sent as a best-effort tagged packet and is not transported using the same QoS-enabled
path as the WAN traffic. Therefore, verify the delay by using the closest network device to the Unified
CCX servers, ideally the access switch to which the server is attached. Cisco IOS provides an extended
ping capable of setting the Layer 3 type of service (ToS) bits to make sure that the ping packet is sent on
the same QoS-enabled path that the WAN traffic will traverse. The time recorded by the extended ping
is the round-trip time (RTT), or the time it takes to traverse the communications path and return. Refer to
the Cisco IOS document available at
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk365/technologies_tech_note09186a0080093f22.shtml#extend_ping
for more detail.

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Bandwidth
Sufficient bandwidth must be provisioned for Unified CCX cluster, Unified CM cluster, Remote Cisco Finesse
Users and other optional components to deploy HA over WAN.
Account for the bandwidth required for the following components:
• Unified CCX Cluster and Unified CM Cluster
Unified CCX cluster consumes bandwidth between the Unified CCX servers in high availability. If the
Unified CM running CTI Manager that Unified CCX communicates with is remote, there would be
additional bandwidth utilized by Unified CCX.
Unified CM could consume significantly higher bandwidth for Intra-Cluster Communication Signaling
(ICCS) between sites when deploying with Unified CCX. This is due to the additional number of call
redirects and CTI/JTAPI communications encompassed in the intra-cluster communications.
Unified CCX can be deployed as ACD to route and queue contacts for available agent or as IP-IVR to
perform self-service. The bandwidth requirements for Unified CCX and Unified CM clusters are different
depending on the deployment type.
The following table shows the minimum bandwidth requirement for Unified CCX and Unified CM
clusters when deploying HA over WAN.

Table 19: Unified CCX HA over WAN Bandwidth Requirement

Unified CCX Cluster Unified CM Cluster


Deployment type Between Unified Between Unified Database1 ICCS
CCX Servers CCX and Remote
Unified CM
Servers

ACD 1.2 Mbps 800 kbps 1.544 Mbps (T1) 70 kbps per 100
BHCA2

IP-IVR 1.2 Mbps 200 kbps 1.544 Mbps (T1) 25 kbps per 100
BHCA

1 This column shows the database bandwidth required for Unified CM clustering over WAN and could be subject to change. For the final authorized value, refer
to Cisco Unified Communications Solution Reference Network Design (SRND) available at: http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd
2 BHCA (Busy Hour Call Attempt) is the number of calls entering the system in the busy hour for Unified CCX or IP-IVR.

For Unified CCX Cluster in the preceding table:


• The traffic between Unified CCX servers includes database replication, heartbeat, and other
communication between the Unified CCX HA servers.
• The traffic between Unified CCX server and remote Unified CM server running CTI Manager is
the JTAPI call signaling.

For Unified CM Cluster in the preceding table:


• Database column includes traffic for database and other inter-server traffic for every Cisco Unified
CM subscriber server remote to the Unified CM publisher.

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Unified CCX High Availability over WAN

• ICCS column shows all the ICCS traffic between CallManager/CallManager services and
CallManager/CTI Manager services running in the Unified CM nodes across sites.

As an example, assume the Unified CCX HA over WAN deployment has two sites and is used as ACD.
Site 1 has the Unified CCX, one Unified CM publisher and two Unified CM subscribers. Site 2 has the
other Unified CCX and two Unified CM subscribers. Unified CCX in site 1 communicates with Unified
CM subscriber in site 2 for JTAPI signaling. In the busy hour, there are 1500 calls coming into Unified
CCX that get routed or queued for agents.

Note • MediaSense recording is not included in the above calculations.


• The maximum supported RTT between the Unified CCX server and the Microsoft
Exchange server is 80 ms.

For Unified CCX cluster, bandwidth required is:


1.2 Mbps + 800 kbps (0.8 Mbps) = 2 Mbps
For Cisco Unified CM cluster, there are two Unified CM subscribers remote from the Unified CM
publisher and the BHCA is 1500. Bandwidth required is:
1.544 Mbps × 2 + 70 kbps × 15 (1.05 Mbps) = 4.138 Mbps
In total, 6.138 Mbps between sites is required for this deployment.
• Agents and Supervisors
In HA over WAN deployment, agents and supervisors could reside in either Unified CCX sites or they
could be remote depending on the location of active Unified CCX server at the time of operation.
Bandwidth should be provisioned for remote agents between sites using the maximum number of agents
from the two sites. Estimate the required bandwidth using the Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop Bandwidth
Calculator available at:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/finesse/
products-technical-reference-list.html
• Optional Components
Customers might have the following optional components deployed across the WAN from Unified CCX
or Unified IP IVR. Ensure to account for the additional bandwidth required in their HA over WAN
deployment.
• Wallboard Server— Determine the amount of data that is retrieved from Unified CCX database
to the remote wallboard server.
• Enterprise Database— Estimate the total amount of data that is retrieved through the database
steps from the remote enterprise database.
• SMTP Server— If the SMTP server is remote from the Unified IP IVR, determine the average
size of each outgoing email and calculate the total.

• To calculate bandwidth for Finesse, see the Finesse Bandwidth Calculator for Unified Contact Center
Express, available at:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/finesse/
products-technical-reference-list.html

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Quality of Service
Quality of Service (QoS) must be enabled and engineered correctly on the network to provide consistent and
predictable end-to-end levels of service. Unified CCX software does not mark any network packet, so ensure
that you mark the traffic at the network edge routers.
The following table shows the recommendations for the QoS markings for Unified CCX HA over WAN
deployment.

Table 20: QoS Recommendations for Unified CCX HA Over WAN

Traffic Recommended QoS Marking


JTAPI Call Signaling IP Precedence 3 (DSCP 24 or PHB CS3)

Database Replication between Unified CCX nodes3 IP Precedence 0 (DSCP 0 or PHB BE)

3 The database traffic may be reprioritized to a higher priority data service (for example, IP Precedence 2 [DSCP 18 or PHB AF21] if required by the particular
business needs). An example of this is the usage of outbound dialer in Unified CCX, which relies on writing data to the Config Datastore.

For more information on QoS requirements of VoIP, refer to the Enterprise QoS Solution Reference Network
Design Guide available here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/WAN_and_MAN/QoS_SRND/QoSIntro.html#wp46447

Deployment Considerations
Consider the following when deploying high availability over WAN with Unified CCX:
• Deploy the ASR or TTS server locally in each Unified CCX site
• Set up Unified CCX to use the local Unified CM servers for both primary and secondary in the following
configurations. If this is not possible, at least the primary Unified CM server should be local.
◦AXL Service Provider
◦JTAPI Provider for Unified CM Telephony Subsystem
◦JTAPI Provider for Resource Manager/Contact Manager Subsystem

Note Significant delays in agent login will occur during Unified CCX failover if AXL and
JTAPI communications are over WAN, especially under load conditions.

• Assign the two sets of CTI Ports (one for the master and the other for the standby engine) to different
device pools, regions and locations, in the CTI Port Group.
• Data in Historical Datastore and Repository Datastore of Informix IDS database start merging after the
network partition is restored. This situation could potentially generate heavy data traffic over WAN.
Restore the WAN link during after hours to minimize the performance impact.
• Do not support VPN tunneling across the WAN.

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Other Design Considerations

Unified CCX-Finesse deployment


Cisco Finesse is supported in both single-node deployment and high-availability deployment over LAN and
WAN.

Unified CCX-MediaSense Deployment


In a LAN deployment, Unified CCX supports:
• A single Cisco MediaSense node
• A two-node Cisco MediaSense cluster

Consider two sites (site A and site B) separated over WAN. A Unified CCX HA cluster over WAN supports:
• A single Cisco MediaSense node on either site A or site B
• A two-node MediaSense cluster, both nodes of which are on either site A or site B

For more information, see Solution Reference Network Design for Cisco MediaSense available here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps11389/products_implementation_design_guides_list.html

Other Design Considerations


Consider the following when designing your Unified CCX system:
• High availability requires additional disk space, so historical call reporting capacity may be reduced.
Historical call reporting capacity also depends upon BHCC, hours of operation per day, and days of
operation per week.
• G.711 call recording requires about 1 MB per minute. G.729 call recording requires about 256 KB per
minute.
• The following categories of data use hard disk space:
◦Linux server operating system files, Unified CCX software, and Informix Database Management
software
◦Unified CCX logs
◦The Unified CCX database (comprised of 4 data stores)
◦Recording files.
Systems planners and designers should attempt to estimate the impact of each in order to determine
hard disk requirements.

• The Unified CM sizing tools assume devices are evenly distributed across all servers. CTI route points
are configured as part of a device pool in the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Server as the
primary CTI Manager being used; it may be required to run the Cisco Unified Communications Manager
sizing tool on a per-location or per-server basis.
• The Unified CM QSIG (Q Signaling) path replacement feature is not supported for Unified CCX calls.
• Unified CM Forced Authorization Codes and Client Matter Codes should be turned off for all route
patterns in the Unified CM cluster that are used by Unified CCX. Enabling these features for route
patterns that are not used by Unified CCX does not affect Unified CCX.

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Multiple Cisco Unified CCX Clusters Integrated with a Single Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cluster

• For a list of unsupported features in Unified CM with Unified CCX, refer to the current release notes
for Unified CCX.
• Unified CCX supports different sets of IP Phones as agent devices on the Unified CM and Unified CM
platform; not all agent devices can be used as IP Phone Agent. For a complete list of supported agent
devices, refer to the Cisco Unified CCX Software and Hardware Compatibility Guide available at http:/
/docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_CCX.
• Finesse allows each agent to choose and set a language from the language selector drop-down list on
the sign-in page.
• An agent using Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop can log in using Extension Mobility but the agent phone
must be in the Unified CM cluster that is used by Unified CCX.
• Sometimes new releases of Unified CM will not support Unified CCX immediately at Unified CM first
customer ship (FCS) time. Some organizations may be early adopters of new Unified CM releases and
may be delayed from migrating to new Unified CM releases and using new Unified CM features if
Unified CCX is installed with that same Unified CM cluster. Therefore, in some situations, it makes
sense to have a separate Unified CM cluster for Unified CCX.
• Cisco Jabber runs in two modes: Deskphone Mode and Softphone Mode. Unified CCX only supports
Cisco Jabber as an agent device in Softphone Mode.

Note Cisco Jabber for Windows is supported for a remote agent.

• Finesse does not support video operation if you are using Cisco Jabber for Windows as agent phone.
• The following features are not supported if you are using Cisco Jabber for Windows as agent phone:
◦Multiline (ACD and non-ACD)
◦Extension Mobility

Multiple Cisco Unified CCX Clusters Integrated with a Single Cisco Unified
Communications Manager Cluster
You can integrate multiple Unified CCX clusters with a single Cisco Unified Communications Manager
cluster.

Note There is no limit to the number of Unified CCX clusters supported with a single Unified CM cluster as
long as the combined agent phones, CTI ports, and CTI route points that are utilized by all Unified CCX
clusters are used to size Unified CM.

• To determine if you need more than one CTI Manager, refer to the Cisco Unified Communications
Solution Reference Network Design (SRND), available at http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd.
If your deployment requires more than one CTI Manager, you load-balance the Unified CCX and other
CTI applications across various CTI Managers in the cluster to provide maximum resilience, performance,
and redundancy.

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Other Deployment Models

For additional CTI Manager best practices, refer to the Cisco Unified Communications Solution Reference
Network Design (SRND), available at http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd.
• If more than one primary subscriber is required to support your configuration, distribute all agents equally
among the subscriber nodes. This configuration assumes that the busy-hour call attempts (BHCA) is
uniform across all agents.
• Each Unified CCX cluster is standalone and independent from other Unified CCX clusters. There is no
communication or synchronization between the Unified CCX clusters. Agents should operate using only
one Unified CCX cluster.
Unified CM Telephony Triggers (CTI Route Points) and CTI ports should be different across Unified
CCX clusters.
• In the list of Resources in Unified CCX Administration, each Unified CCX cluster displays all the agents
in the Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster, even though the agents can operate and log in
to another Unified CCX cluster.
This situation requires that the Unified CCX Administrator be aware of which resources are associated
with each cluster. The Unified CCX Administrator can mitigate this situation by having a unique naming
convention for resources associated with a particular Unified CCX cluster.
• This deployment is not intended to provide Unified CCX redundancy across different Unified CCX
clusters. If a Unified CCX cluster fails, the agents that operate in this cluster cannot operate in other
Unified CCX clusters. If another Unified CCX cluster is configured to accept the calls that were originally
sent to the Unified CCX cluster that failed, there will be no report integration between the Unified CCX
clusters.
• This deployment does not change the characteristics and design recommendations of each individual
Unified CCX cluster. For example, within a Unified CCX cluster, high availability is still supported.

Other Deployment Models


Cisco HCS Deployment Models
For information about the supported Cisco HCS deployment models, see Solution Reference Network Design
for Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution available at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/ps11363/products_implementation_design_guides_list.html

Cisco Remote Expert


For information about the supported Cisco Remote Expert deployment models, see Cisco Remote Expert
Solution Design Guide available at:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/enterprise/design-zone/remote_expert.html

Other Unified Communications Integration


Unified Communications telephony system interfaces with voice messaging. It supports other vendor voicemail.
The voice storage is dependent on storage capacity.

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CHAPTER 3
Features
• Cisco Finesse, page 47
• Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent, page 52
• Inbound Voice, page 52
• Unified CCX Outbound Dialer, page 53
• Home Agent with Extend and Connect, page 59
• Remote Agent Over Broadband, page 63
• Unified CCX Web Chat, page 63
• Unified CCX Finesse Agent Email, page 65
• Reporting, page 67
• Configuration APIs, page 72
• Remote Expert Mobile, page 72
• Post Call Treatment, page 72
• Purge Enhancement, page 72
• Security, page 72
• Caller ID Support, page 73
• E.164 Support, page 73
• Context Service, page 74

Cisco Finesse
Introduction
Cisco Finesse is a next-generation agent and supervisor desktop designed to provide a collaborative experience
for the various communities that interact with your customer service organization.
Cisco IM and Presence functionality can be provided to the agents using Jabber.

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Cisco Finesse

Cisco Finesse provides:


• A browser-based administration console and a browser-based desktop for agents and supervisors; no
client-side installations are required.
• A single, customizable cockpit or interface, that gives customer care providers quick and easy access to
multiple assets and information sources.
• REST APIs that simplify the development and integration of value-added applications and minimize
the need for detailed desktop development expertise.

The following table lists the availability of the Cisco Finesse REST APIs by license packages:

Table 21: Cisco Finesse REST APIs availability by license packages

Service Unified CCX Premium Unified CCX Enhanced Unified CCX Standard
Cisco Finesse REST Available Available Not available
APIs

The following table lists the availability of the Cisco Finesse service in the Unified CCX packages:

Table 22: Cisco Finesse service availability by license packages

Service Unified CCX Premium Unified CCX Unified CCX Unified IP IVR
Enhanced Standard
Cisco Finesse Available Available Not available Not available

Cisco Finesse functionalities


Cisco Finesse supports the following functionalities:
• Basic call control—Answer, hold, retrieve, end, and make calls.
• Advanced call control—Make a consultation call and transfer or conference the call after the consultation.
• Not Ready and Sign Out reason codes—Reasons that agents can select when they change their state to
Not Ready.
• Wrap-up codes—Reasons that agents can apply to calls.
• Phone books—List of contacts from which agents can select one to call.
• Live data gadgets—Display current state of agents, teams and CSQs in the contact center.
• Customizable third-party gadgets.
• Recording using MediaSense and/or Workforce Optimization.
• Scheduled call back—Request a callback at a specific callback phone number and also specify the time
or date of the callback.
• Reclassify—Reclassify a direct preview outbound call as busy, answering machine, fax, invalid number,
or voice.

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• Outbound agent—Supports outbound dialing including progressive, predictive, and direct preview
modes, allowing agents to handle both inbound and outbound dialing tasks.
• Multisession webchat—Allows agents to work on multiple chat sessions at the same time for increased
agent resource usage.
• Multisession email—Allows agents to work on multiple email sessions at the same time for increased
agent resource usage.
• Multiline—Provides multiple lines on agent phones.
• Extension mobility—Allows users to temporarily access their Cisco Unified IP Phone configuration
such as line appearances, services, and speed dials from other Cisco Unified IP Phones.

Note • Team composition changes in Cisco Finesse are not updated dynamically. Log in again or refresh
the browser session to see the changes.
• Transition to Logout state is possible only from Not Ready state.
• Limit the team that accesses Live Data reports to a maximum of 50 agents.
• Unified CCX 10.6 with mixed mode COP file supports concurrent use of Cisco Finesse Desktop
and Cisco Finesse Agent or Supervisor Desktop Finesse.
• Migration tools are not available to migrate configurations between Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop
or Cisco Supervisor Desktop and Finesse. When you migrate, manually recreate configurations such
as reason codes, wrap-up codes, workflows, contacts, and phone books.

You can configure the Cisco Finesse Agent and Supervisor Desktops to use Cisco gadgets and third-party
gadgets through a layout management method. You can customize the Cisco Finesse Agent and Supervisor
Desktops through the Cisco Finesse administration console. The administrators can define the tab names that
appear on the desktops and configure which gadgets appear on each tab.
For information about supported browsers and operating systems, see the Cisco Unified Contact Center
Express Software and Hardware Compatibility Guide at http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_
for_Unified_CCX.

Note Cisco Finesse does not support video on Jabber endpoints.

Cisco Finesse Desktop latency


Cisco Finesse Agent and Supervisor Desktops can be located remotely from Unified CCX. The round-trip
time between the Unified CCX server and the agent desktop must not exceed 400 ms.

Bandwidth requirement for Cisco Finesse client to server


The agent and supervisor login operation involves loading web pages, and includes the CTI login and the
display of the initial agent state. After the desktop web page loads, the required bandwidth is significantly
less.

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Because Cisco Finesse is a web application, caching can significantly impact the required bandwidth. For
example, the first time an agent logs in, the number of bytes transmitted is approximately 2 megabytes. If
caching is enabled in the browser, during subsequent logins, the number of bytes transmitted is 0.134 megabytes.
Because of additional gadgets on the supervisor desktop, this number is higher for a supervisor login
(approximately 2.5 megabytes without caching and 0.325 megabytes with caching). To minimize the amount
of bandwidth required for login, make sure that caching is enabled in the browser.
To help you with the bandwidth calculation, Cisco Finesse provides a bandwidth calculator to estimate the
bandwidth required to accommodate the client login time.
Note that during failover, agents are redirected to the alternate server and are logged in automatically. For
example, if you configure your bandwidth so that login takes 5 minutes and a client failover event occurs,
agents will take 5 minutes to successfully log in to the alternate server.
The Cisco Finesse bandwidth calculator does not include the bandwidth required for any third-party gadgets
in the Cisco Finesse container or any other applications running on the agent desktop client.
The bandwidth listed in the bandwidth calculator must be available for Cisco Finesse after you account for
the bandwidth used by other applications, including voice traffic that may share this bandwidth. The
performance of the Cisco Finesse interface, and potentially the quality of voice sharing this bandwidth, may
degrade if sufficient bandwidth is not continuously available.

Administration
The administrator can access the Cisco Finesse administration web user interface in read and write mode from
the Unified CCX publisher node. From the Unified CCX subscriber node, access is read-only.

Cisco Finesse REST API


Cisco Finesse provides a REST API that allows client applications to access the supported features. The REST
API uses secure HTTP (HTTPS) as the transport with XML payloads.
Cisco Finesse provides a JavaScript library and sample gadget code that can help expedite third-party
integration. You can find developer documentation for the REST API, the JavaScript library, and sample
gadgets at this location: https://developer.cisco.com/site/finesse/.

Silent monitoring
The supervisors can monitor agents calls using Unified Communications Manager-based silent monitoring
with Cisco Finesse.
Cisco Finesse does not support SPAN port-based monitoring and desktop monitoring to silent monitor the
agent.

Recording
Cisco Finesse workflows can be used to record agent calls using Cisco Unified Communications Manager
with Cisco MediaSense or Cisco Workforce Optimization.

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Note The agent phone must have built-in-bridge (BIB) support enabled for Cisco Unified Communications
Manager-based call recording and monitoring to work with Cisco Finesse.
For information about the phones that have built-in-bridge support, see the Software and Hardware
Compatibility Guide for Cisco Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR at this location: http://
docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_CCX.

For information about recording APIs, see the Cisco Finesse Web Service Developer Guide at http://
developer.cisco.com/web/finesse/docs.
Cisco MediaSense Search and Play Gadget
The Search and Play gadget available on the Supervisor desktop allows you to access all recordings stored in
MediaSense.
Recording Tag
Recordings initiated by Unified CCX and stored in Cisco MediaSense are tagged with semantic, contextual
metadata. If participants of the call that is being recorded change, there is no change in tags for that call. These
tags are prefixed by CCX: and contain the following parameters:
• agent = <agent ID> of each logged-in Unified CCX agent who participated in the recording.
• team = <team name> of all those teams whose agents have participated in the recording.
• CSQ = <CSQ name> of that CSQ where the call being recorded was queued and processed.

For example, Tag: CCX:agent=abc,team=Deafult,CSQ=Auto_CSQ.


These tags enable supervisors and agents to filter and search recordings in Cisco MediaSense Search and Play
Gadget based on one or a combination of the parameters.

Multiline support
Cisco Finesse supports the use of multiple lines on agent phones. You can configure one or more secondary
lines on an agent phone. The agent's ACD line must be in button positions 1 - 4. Any calls on the observed
lines are reported in the historical reports. However, Finesse blocks any events that are sent by the CTI server
as a result of call activity on an agent’s non-primary/non-ACD line (lines other than the one the agent is logged
into). These events are not published to Finesse clients. No information about calls that are handled on
non-primary/non ACD line appears on the Finesse desktop. Agent state is not modified as a result of activity
on the agent's secondary line.
For example, if Agent A uses his non-ACD line to call Agent B (on Agent B's primary/ACD extension), the
call does not appear on Agent A's desktop. The call appears on Agent B's desktop because Agent B received
the call on the primary/ACD extension.
Direct Transfer Across Line (DTAL) and Join Across Line (JAL) are not supported.

NAT support
Cisco Finesse does not support NAT.

IPv6 support
Cisco Finesse provides support for IPv6 with Unified CCX.

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E.164 support
Unified CCX agents and supervisors can login to Finesse with ‘+’ (plus sign) as prefix. Finesse also supports
E.164 for the following:
• Enterprise Data
• Phone Book Contacts
• Workflow Rules or Conditions

Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent


With Cisco Finesse IP Phone Agent (IPPA), agents and supervisors can access Finesse features on their Cisco
IP Phones as an alternative to accessing Cisco Finesse through the browser. Cisco Finesse IPPA supports
fewer features than the Finesse desktop in the browser, but it does allow agents and supervisors to receive
and manage Finesse calls if they lose or do not have access to Cisco Finesse through a browser.

Supervisor Tasks
Cisco Finesse IPPA does not support supervisor tasks such as monitor, barge, and intercept, but supervisors
can sign in and perform all agent tasks on their IP Phones. For reporting purpose the supervisor will have to
log in to Cisco Unified Intelligence Center to view the live data reports.

Reason Code Limits


On the IP Phone, Cisco Finesse can display a maximum of 100 Not Ready or Sign Out reason codes. If more
than 100 codes are configured, the phone lists the first 100 applicable codes (global codes or applicable team
codes).

Inbound Voice
• Integrated IVR, call queuing, and routing under the same package
• Out-of-the-box support for scripting the business logic
• Enterprise database and document manipulation using scripting tool through REST APIs
• Real-time statistics on contacts to make run-time decisions
• Full scale automated speech recognition, text to speech and Voice XML scripting

Codec Support
Unified CCX supports the following codecs:
• G.711 a-law and μ-law
• G.729

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Note Recording, playback, and TTS are not supported for a-law.

Unified CCX Outbound Dialer


Unified CCX supports the following outbound dialers:
Unified CCX Outbound Preview Dialer—Allows agents to participate in outbound campaigns in addition
to handling inbound calls, which maintains a high level of agent productivity.
Unified CCX Outbound IVR Dialer (Progressive and Predictive)—Allows for outbound calls to be placed
to contacts in a campaign and subsequently for live contacts to be serviced by an IVR application. Call progress
analysis (CPA) capabilities of the SIP Voice gateway are used to filter non-live contacts (which could be fax
and no answer). Live calls that are answered by a customer and answering machine contact are transferred to
a CTI route point to be serviced by an associated IVR application. An outbound IVR call that is answered by
a customer contact but cannot be serviced due to unavailability of an IVR port is said to be abandoned.
Unified CCX Outbound Agent Dialer (Progressive and Predictive)—Allows for outbound calls to be
placed to contacts in a campaign and subsequently for live contacts to be serviced by agents. Agents can log
in using the Cisco Finesse agent desktop. Call progress analysis (CPA) capabilities of the SIP Voice gateway
are used to filter non-live contacts (which could be fax and no answer). Live calls that are answered by a
customer are transferred to an agent. An outbound call that is answered by a customer contact but cannot be
serviced due to unavailability of an agent is transferred to a CTI route point to be serviced by an associated
IVR application.

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High Level Components


This figure and the following table describe the components deployed in Cisco Unified Outbound:

Figure 5: Cisco Unified Outbound Components

Campaign Manager Responsible for starting and stopping each campaign and retrieving and updating
contact records from and to the database.

Dialer Receives contacts from the Campaign Manager and initiates the outbound calls.
Notifies the Campaign Manager of the call status and call result after the call is
answered. The dialer software is IP based and does not require any telephony
cards for making outbound calls. In Outbound Preview, the dialer uses the Finesse
agent IP phone to place outbound calls through a voice gateway configured in
Unified CM. In Outbound IVR, the dialer uses the SIP protocol to place outbound
calls through the SIP gateway configured for the Outbound IVR feature.

Resource Manager Monitors agent states, reserves agents and receives instructions from the Dialer
to place the outbound call. This component is used only in the Outbound Preview
feature.

CTI Server Handles requests and responses from and to the Finesse and passes the customer
data to the Finesse for screen pop. This component is used only in the Outbound
Preview feature.

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Functional Description

IVR Subsystem Responsible for execution of the IVR application associated with the campaign
when a live contact has been detected by the SIP gateway and transferred to the
configured CTI Route Point on the Unified CM. This component is used only
in the Outbound IVR feature.

Config Datastore (CDS) Contains the customer contacts information.

All of these components run as part of the Unified CCX Engine and cannot be installed separately.

Functional Description
There are three types of dialing modes in outbound: Direct Preview, Progressive, and Predictive.

Outbound Preview
The Outbound Preview feature supports only the direct preview dialing mode. It uses a 3-stage process for
making an outbound call. The first stage is to find an available agent and retrieve the customer information
for making the outbound call. The second stage is the reservation call, and its purpose is to reserve an agent
and send customer data to the agent desktop. During this stage, the agent is reserved and the data appears on
the desktop so that the agent can review the data and decide whether to accept the call by pressing the
corresponding button on the agent desktop. If the agent does not accept the call, the call is handled by other
outbound agents or closed for the campaign. If the agent does accept the call, Outbound Preview kicks in the
last stage where Unified CM is instructed to place the outbound call using the agent's phone. When the
outbound call is answered, Outbound Preview updates the customer contact in the database with the call status
and call result.
When the outbound call connects with the customer, the agent can perform all call control operations that are
normally supported on inbound calls (transfer, conference, hold, retrieve, and so on). Ensure that the agent
transfers or conferences the outbound call, only if the call is answered by a person but not through other media
such as an answering machine or a fax machine.

Note CUBE is supported with the Outbound Predictive and Progressive dialers for agent and IVR with CPA
(Call Progress Analysis).

Outbound IVR and Agent


The Outbound IVR feature supports two types of dialing modes namely progressive and predictive. Each
dialer dials an appropriate number of contacts to make efficient use on the available system resources (IVR
Ports). Both algorithms use a ratio called lines per port (LPP) to determine the number of outbound calls to
place per available IVR port.
Progressive algorithm uses an LPP value configured by the administrator through Unified CCX Administration.
Predictive algorithm dynamically varies the LPP to ensure that the abandon rate does not exceed the threshold
configured through Unified CCX Administration (abandon rate is the percentage of live calls that had to be
dropped due to the unavailability of an IVR port).

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Outbound IVR uses the Call Progress Analysis (CPA) capability of the SIP gateway to place and filter outbound
calls. The SIP gateway filters out non-live contacts such as fax, invalid number, and no answer and forwards
only the live calls answered by a customer contact and answering machine to a CTI Route Point on the Unified
CM. This operation in turn triggers execution of an IVR application associated with the campaign at Unified
CCX.

High Availability for Outbound Dialer


The following events occur during a failover in Outbound:
• If a reservation call is at the agent desktop waiting for the agent to accept the call, and the master engine
goes down, the agent is automatically logged out and the reservation call disappears from the agent's
desktop. If the master engine restarts during failover, the call status for that contact record will be set to
unknown. If the master engine does not restart during failover, the contact is called when the campaign
starts and there are available agents.
• If a reservation call has been accepted by the agent and the call is ringing on the customer phone, there
is no effect on the call. However, the agent is logged off and will be able to invoke call control capabilities
only through the phone.

In the case of IVR Outbound, the CTI ports on the master engine will go out of service on a failover, which
will result in calls in progress between customers and CTI ports to be disconnected. The standby server will
resume dialing out the remaining contacts in the outbound IVR campaigns after the failover.
In the case of agent Outbound (progressive and predictive), if an agent is reserved for an outbound campaign
and the master engine goes down before the call is transferred to the agent, then the agent is automatically
logged out. The dialed out contacts if any, that are yet to be connected to the agent are dropped.
When deploying Outbound in a high availability environment, only the dialer in the master node is active.
Outbound calls cannot be distributed or load balanced to the dialer in the standby node.

Scalability
These capacities and limits are supported for outbound:
• Preview outbound supports a maximum of 150 agents.
• Progressive and predictive agent-based outbound supports a maximum of 150 agents.
• Progressive and predictive IVR-based outbound supports a maximum of 150 IVR ports. The number of
active outbound IVR ports is limited by the maximum number of outbound IVR ports that are supported
for a given platform. Because IVR for inbound and outbound compete for the same set of IVR ports,
the actual number of active IVR ports in use for inbound and outbound depends on multiple parameters:
• Number of licensed inbound ports
• Number of licensed outbound ports
• Sum of the number of ports dedicated across outbound IVR campaigns

Refer to the “Configuring Unified CCX Dialer” chapter of the Unified CCX Administration Guide for details
on how the numbers of active IVR ports for inbound and outbound are determined by these parameters.

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Call Flow Description

Direct Preview Mode


In the direct preview mode, the agent hears the ring-out on the agent phone. The direct preview call flow
proceeds as illustrated in this figure and the description that follows:

Figure 6: Call Flow for Direct Preview Mode

1 An agent in Ready state is available and the Dialer has retrieved contact records from the Campaign
Manager. The Dialer requests the Resource Manager to reserve the agent.
2 The Resource Manager reserves the agent by moving the agent to Reserved state.
3 The Dialer sends a reservation call to the agent desktop and, at the same time, a screen pops that contains
the customer information and is presented to the agent. The agent reviews the customer data and decides
whether to take the call.
4 The agent can choose to accept, skip, or cancel this reservation call. If the agent chooses to accept it, the
agent clicks the Accept button on the desktop.
5 The Dialer instructs the Resource Manager to place an outbound call from the agent phone through Unified
CM out to the voice gateway. Because this call is a direct preview call, the agent immediately hears the
ringback of the customer phone.
6 As soon as the call is answered, the Dialer closes the contact, classifies it as a voice call and sends the
result to the Campaign Manager. If an answering machine answers the call, the number is invalid, or the
customer requests a callback, and the agent can reclassify the call from the desktop accordingly. If the

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customer requests a callback and the agent reclassifies the call, the customer is called back using the same
number, an alternate number, or a callback number specified by the customer.

Note A CTI Port is not required to place the outbound call.

IVR Mode
The call flow description for Outbound IVR is illustrated in this figure and the description that follows.

Figure 7: Call Flow for IVR Mode

1 Outbound IVR dialer determines the number of contacts to dial per the configured algorithm (progressive
or predictive) and places outbound calls using SIP through the voice gateway.
2 Voice gateway detects non-live contact through its CPA capabilities and sends status of non-live contact
to the dialer. The dialer uses this to update contact status information in the configuration database.
3 Voice gateway detects live contact through its CPA capabilities and sends status of live contact to the
dialer. The dialer uses this to update contact status information in the configuration database and also
sends a SIP refer message to the SIP gateway which in turn transfers the call to the configured CTI Route
Point on Cisco Unified CM.
4 Cisco Unified CM transfers the call to a IVR port on Cisco Unified CCX server.
5 The IVR subsystem then associates the call with the IVR application associated with the campaign. The
engine starts execution of the application and an IVR session takes place between the IVR application for
the campaign on Cisco Unified CCX and the customer contact.

Deployment Guidelines
The following guidelines should be followed when deploying outbound:

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• Outbound supports a maximum of 15 active campaigns and a maximum of 10,000 active outbound
records for each campaign.
• Outbound does not come preinstalled with any Do Not Call lists. The system administrator should
manually filter the contact list against the Do Not Call list prior to importing contacts.

The following guidelines are specific to outbound:


• Outbound supports a maximum of 10 CSQs for each campaign.
• Finesse IPPA agents are not supported.
• Direct preview outbound cannot detect an answering machine, fax, or modem. The agent should manually
reclassify the call to “answer machine” or “fax” from the desktop. The contact will be called again using
the same number (in the case of “answer machine”) or using an alternate number (in the case of “fax”).
• For direct preview outbound, agents should not transfer or conference the outbound call if the call is
answered by the media other than a person, such as an answering machine or fax machine.
• For progressive and predictive outbound, the SIP gateway performs call progressive analysis which
determines whether the outcome of a call is an answering machine, live voice, fax, or beep tone and
presents only the live voice calls to the agents. The contact will be called again using the same number
in case of no answer and busy tone or using an alternate number in case of a fax, modem or an invalid
number.

The following guidelines are specific to IVR and agent-based progressive and predictive outbound:
• It is possible to only have a single instance of the SIP gateway in the deployment.
• Install the SIP gateway on the same site (that is, the same campus LAN) as the Unified CCX primary
engine. The SIP gateway can be installed across the LAN or WAN. The maximum delay over the WAN
should not exceed 80 milliseconds.

Note The primary engine is always the first node that was installed in the Unified CCX cluster
and cannot be changed.

• No redundancy of the SIP gateway is supported.


• The protocol supported between the SIP Gateway and Unified CM for transferring the outbound call to
an IVR application or to an available agent includes SIP and H323.
• It is possible to use the same gateway for both inbound and outbound voice.

Home Agent with Extend and Connect


Definitions
• CTI Remote Device — New device type that represents the user’s off-cluster phones, which the users
plan to use with Cisco Unified Communications applications. The device type is configured with one
or more lines (for example, Directory Numbers) and one or more remote destinations.

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• Remote Destinations — A numerical address that represents the user’s other phones (for example, home
office line and other PBX phone). The phone can be any off-cluster device such as DVO-R
(Dial-via-Office-Reverse).

Introduction
The Extend and Connect feature can be configured for agents and supervisors on remote devices to accept
inbound and outbound calls. This feature works with Cisco Jabber for Windows in Extended mode and the
new CTI Remote Device type and enables applications to have limited call control capability over third-party
devices of an user. Configure all third-party devices or end points of an user as remote destinations on a virtual
CTI Remote Device. You can configure third-party devices or end points of an user from Cisco Unified
Communications Manager administration console.
If there is an active remote destination set for a remote device, a call to that device is placed only to the active
remote destination.

Note You cannot perform silent monitoring on Home Agents using this feature.

Feature Availability by License Package


The following table lists the availability of Extend and Connect feature in the Unified CCX packages.

Feature Unified CCX Unified CCX Unified CCX Unified IP IVR


Premium Enhanced Standard

Extend and Connect Available Available Not available Not available

Persistent Connection Call


Persistent connection allows an agent to maintain a dedicated connection with an active remote destination.
Persistent connection is supported from Cisco Unified Communications Manager. This connection saves
connection establishment time for each call.
A persistent connection call is made to the active remote destination during agent login. The agent answers
the persistent connection call only from a configured remote destination. ICD calls are placed over persistent
connection. The agent moves to Ready state after answering the persistent connection call. Unified CCX plays
an announcement upon answering persistent connection call provided that announcement is configured with
the identifier as “UCCX Persistent Connection Prompt”.
After the persistent connection is established for incoming calls, Unified CCX plays an announcement on
persistent connection provided that announcement is configured with identifier as "UCCX Customer Call
Prompt". The agent’s remote device displays the caller ID during the ICD call provided that the remote device
has a provision to display caller information. The caller ID name is displayed as EC Mode. The caller
information remains displayed until the next call is placed on the persistent connection call. By default, Unified
CCX makes a maximum of three attempts to establish a persistent connection call.
The default call duration for a persistent connection is 12 hours. You can change the persistent connection
duration using the Maximum Call Duration Timer field in Cisco Unified Communications Manager. For
more information about configuring the Maximum Call Duration in Cisco Unified Communications Manager,
go to http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/meetingplace/8_5/english/administration/cucm_
integration.html#wp1054377.

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When a persistent connection call is not answered, the agent is moved to Not Ready state and is not allowed
to move to Ready state until the persistent connection call is established. The persistent connection call is
dropped after the agent logs out.
The following figure shows the persistent connection call flow:

Figure 8: Persistent Connection Call Flow

The following figure shows a persistent connection incoming call:

Figure 9: Persistent Connection Incoming Call

For remote phones that have persistent connection, the following features are not supported:

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• Call Hold/Resume is not supported for a persistent connection call.


• Intercept/Barge-In is not supported for persistent connection with Cisco Finesse.
• The Real-time reporting and Historical reports do not distinguish extend and connect agents from normal
agents. The current reports show information pertaining to all agents in the same manner.
• The supervisors cannot initiate recording for remote agents using Cisco MediaSense directly, but recording
can be achieved using Gateway forking. For more information about Cisco MediaSense, see the Cisco
Unified CCX Administration guide at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_installation_and_configuration_
guides_list.html
• The maximum number of supported remote agents is 100.
• Extend and connect is not supported on shared lines.
• Live Data and Historical reports do not distinguish the remote agents from the enterprise agents.

Signaling Flow
The following figure shows the signaling flow chart:

Figure 10: Signaling Flow

Agent and Device Configuration


To use this feature, perform the following configuration:
1 Configure CTI Remote Device, CSF for Cisco Jabber, and Remote Destinations in Cisco Unified
Communications Manager Version 10.x.
2 Configure ICT between Cisco Unified Communications Manager Version 10.x and Cisco Unified Presence
server Version 10.x.

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Call by Call Mode


Unified CCX administrator can switch off persistent connection using Unified CCX Administration page to
enable Call by Call mode. In this mode, every call will be routed independently to the Home Agent as if the
agent is using an IP phone. When the call ends, the Home Agent's phone disconnects before it is made ready
for the next call.

Deployment Guidelines
In case of fresh deployments of Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Unified CCX, ensure that the
DNS is configured for all the components.

Remote Agent Over Broadband


Unified CCX supports remote agents (for example, at-home agents) using Cisco Unified IP Phone over a
broadband internet connection.
The Cisco VPN Client feature available in select Cisco Unified IP Phones provides another option for remote
agents to connect their IP Phones to the enterprise.
The enterprise will need to deploy and set up an appliance which supports SSL VPN connectivity. Connectivity
between the remote agent and enterprise must be over broadband/SSL VPN.
The VPN feature needs to be configured on the Cisco Unified Communication Manager as per the Cisco
Unified Communications Manager Security Guide.
The Cisco Unified IP Phone should then be configured within the enterprise as detailed in the Cisco Unified
IP Phone Administration Guide for Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
After the IP Phone has been configured in the enterprise, the agent can then take it home and connect it to a
regular broadband router to obtain VPN connectivity to the enterprise. The agent will then be able to use the
configured extension for receiving and placing calls from home.

Unified CCX Web Chat


As part of the Premium offering, Unified CCX agents can service customer chat requests using the Agent
Web Chat gadget in Cisco Finesse.
As stated in the overview section, this feature requires a Cisco SocialMiner deployment to accept and relay
the contact requests from a customer website. One SocialMiner deployment can serve only one Unified CCX
deployment (single node or high availability deployment). SocialMiner does not support redundancy.

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Deployment Scenario 1: Customer Web Site in Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)

Deployment Scenario 1: Customer Web Site in Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)


Figure 11: Customer Web Site in DMZ

The Unified CCX is deployed inside the enterprise firewall and SocialMiner is deployed inside company
premises in the DMZ along with the customer website. The DMZ is open to all HTTP/HTTPS traffic from
the Internet. The Unified CCX is shielded from all outside traffic except the traffic coming from the DMZ
zone. All web chat communications occur over HTTP/HTTPS and BOSH ports irrespective of where
SocialMiner is deployed.

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Deployment Scenario 2: Customer Web Site in Public Cloud or Domain

Deployment Scenario 2: Customer Web Site in Public Cloud or Domain


Figure 12: Customer Web Site in Public Cloud or Domain

One variation of the preceding scenario can be an addition of a proxy server that can intercept and relay all
calls going to SocialMiner.

Unified CCX Finesse Agent Email


As part of the Unified CCX Premium offering, Unified CCX supports agent email with Finesse.
The administrator must configure the Cisco Finesse Desktop Layout for agents and supervisors.
For more information, see “Cisco Finesse” section in the Cisco Unified CCX Administration Guide, Release
11.0 at :
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-express/
products-installation-and-configuration-guides-list.html.
Cisco Finesse Agent Email requires the deployment of Cisco SocialMiner to handle the email and relay the
contact requests from a mail server. One SocialMiner deployment can serve only one Unified CCX deployment
(single-node or high-availability deployment), and vice versa.

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Unified CCX Finesse Agent Email

The Cisco Finesse Agent Email feature requires the use of an external mail server (Microsoft Exchange 2010
and 2013 are supported). This mail server is not provided, installed, or configured as part of the Unified CCX
installation. To communicate with the Exchange Server, SocialMiner uses secure IMAP (for message retrieval)
and secure SMTP (for message sending). On the Exchange Server, enable IMAP (SMTP is enabled by default).
For more information about enabling IMAP, see section “Mail Server Configuration” in Cisco Unified CCX
Administration Guide, Release 11.0 at:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-express/
products-installation-and-configuration-guides-list.html.

Figure 13: Customer Web Site in DMZ

Unified CCX allows email contacts to be routed to agents based on the email addresses to which they are sent
by the customers. Cisco Finesse Agent Email feature uses skill-based routing and last-agent email routing.
Separate CSQs are required for Email. You must associate each Email CSQ with a separate email account on
the mail server. This account must be dedicated to the Cisco Finesse Agent Email feature and must not be
used for other purposes. Agent association with Email CSQs is configured in the same manner as Voice CSQs
by assigning skills and competency levels to the CSQ.
For information about Email Contact Distribution Features, see Finesse Agent Email Contact Distribution.
Cisco Finesse provides a common chat and email state, separate from voice state. Blending ensures that agents
can handle voice, email, and chat contacts from the same desktop. Emails are routed only to agents that are
assigned to at least one Email CSQ.
When an agent replies to the customer's email, the reply email address depends on the information in the
customer's email. If the customer's email contains the Reply-to header field, the agent's reply email is sent to
the email address in the Reply-to header. If the Reply-to header is missing in the customer's email, the agent's
reply email is sent to the From address in the customer's email. The sender address of agent's email is the

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Reporting

email account associated with the Email CSQ on which the reply is being sent. Upon requeue, Unified CCX
ensures that the response is sent with the email address of the requeued CSQ as the From address.

Reporting

Unified Intelligence Center


Unified Intelligence Center is the reporting solution for Unified CCX. Unified Intelligence Center is a
comprehensive, end-to-end reporting solution. You can access Historical reports and Live Data reports.

Note Historical Reporting Client (HRC) is no longer available with Unified CCX.

Unified Intelligence Center Historical reports


The following table presents the Historical reports that are available for each license package:

Historical reports Premium Enhanced Standard IP-IVR


Chat reports

Chat Agent Detail Report Yes No No No

Chat Agent Summary Report Yes No No No

Chat CSQ Activity Report Yes No No No

Chat CSQ Agent Summary Report Yes No No No

Chat Traffic Analysis Report Yes No No No

Email reports

Email Agent Activity Report Yes No No No

Email Contact Service Queue Activity Report Yes No No No

Email Contact Service Queue Agent Activity Report Yes No No No

Email Inbox Traffic Analysis Report Yes No No No

Email Resolution Detail Report Yes No No No

Email Response Detail Report Yes No No No

Inbound reports

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Historical reports Premium Enhanced Standard IP-IVR


Abandoned Call Detail Activity Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Aborted Rejected Call Detail Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Agent Call Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent Detail Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent Login Logout Activity Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent Not Ready Reason Code Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent State Detail Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent State Summary by Agent Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent State Summary by Interval Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Agent Wrap-up Data Summary Report Yes Yes No No

Agent Wrap-up Data Detail Report Yes Yes No No

Call Custom Variables Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Called Number Summary Activity Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Common Skill CSQ Activity report Yes Yes Yes No

Contact Service Queue Activity by CSQ Report Yes Yes Yes No

Contact Service Queue Activity Report Yes Yes Yes No

Contact Service Queue Activity Report by Interval Yes Yes Yes No

Contact Service Queue Call Distribution Summary Yes Yes Yes No

Contact Service Queue Priority Summary Yes Yes Yes No

Contact Service Queue Service Level Priority Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

CSQ Agent Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Detailed Call by Call CCDR Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Detailed Call CSQ Agent Report Yes Yes Yes No

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Unified Intelligence Center

Historical reports Premium Enhanced Standard IP-IVR


Priority Summary Activity Report Yes Yes No No

Traffic Analysis Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Outbound reports 4

Agent Outbound Campaign Summary Report No No No No

Agent Outbound CCDR Report No No No No

Agent Outbound Half Hourly Report No No No No

IVR Outbound Campaign Summary Report No No No No

IVR Outbound CCDR Report No No No No

IVR Outbound Half Hourly Report No No No No

Outbound Agent Detail Performance Report No No No No

Preview Outbound Agent Detail Performance Report Yes No No No

Preview Outbound Campaign Summary Report Yes No No No

System reports

Application Performance Analysis Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

Application Summary Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

License Utilization Hourly Report Yes Yes Yes Yes

4 Obtain Outbound license that is optional with the Premium license to access IVR and Agent-Outbound reports.

Unified Intelligence Center Live Data reports


The following table presents the Live Data reports that are available for each license package:

Live Data reports Premium Enhanced Standard IP-IVR


Agent reports

Agent CSQ Statistics Report Yes Yes No No

Agent State Log Report Yes Yes No No

Agent Statistics Report Yes Yes No No

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Unified Intelligence Center

Live Data reports Premium Enhanced Standard IP-IVR


Agent Team Summary Report Yes Yes No No

Supervisor reports

Agent Outbound Team Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Chat Agent Statistics Report Yes No No No

Chat CSQ Summary Report Yes No No No

Team State Report Yes Yes Yes No

Team Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Voice CSQ Agent Detail Report Yes Yes Yes No

Voice CSQ Summary Report Yes Yes Yes No

Note • The team that accesses Live Data reports has a maximum limit of 50 agents.
• Maximum number of users supported is 42 to run Live-Data Reports concurrently on Cisco Unified
Intelligence Center.
• All the Live Data reports are available as gadgets. For more information to configure gadgets, see
the Cisco Unified CCX Administration Guide, located at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/
custcosw/ps1846/products_installation_and_configuration_guides_list.html.
• Live Data counters in the Unified Intelligence Center reports and the Cisco Finesse gadgets are reset
in the following scenarios:
• Manual reset—Administrator resets the real-time report counters from the Application
Administration interface.
• Automatic reset—Daily purge resets the real-time report counters at midnight (in the local
Unified CCX server time zone).

If there are active calls at the time of reset, the Contact Service Queue (CSQ) reports display data
for the calls, and the agent report counters are set to zero.
• Live Data reports are not updated dynamically if configuration changes are made to CSQ, team, or
agents. Refresh the report to see the latest changes.
• Live Data reports do not support team names and CSQ names that have multi-byte characters. Such
team names and CSQ names are not synced from Unified CCX to Unified Intelligence Center, but
user names are synced.

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Finesse Reports

Finesse Reports
Agents and supervisors can access Live Data reports that are configured to be displayed as gadgets in the
desktops. The following are the default reports that are configured:
Agent desktop
• Home tab
• Agent CSQ Statistics Report
• Agent Team Summary Report

• My Statistics tab
◦Agent Statistics Report
◦Agent State Log Report

Supervisor desktop
• Team Data tab
• Team Summary Report—Short and Long Term Average
• Team Summary Report—Since Midnight

• Queue Data tab


• Voice CSQ Agent Detail Report
• Voice CSQ Summary Report

Note To add or modify the report gadgets, contact your administrator. For more information, see Cisco Unified
CCX Administration Guide available here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_installation_and_configuration_
guides_list.html

Wallboards
Unified CCX supports wallboard reporting. Obtain the wallboard from a Cisco-approved vendor from Cisco
Marketplace:
https://marketplace.cisco.com/

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Configuration APIs

Configuration APIs
The Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Application Programming Interface (UCCXAPI) provides a
platform to integrate provisioning applications similar to what is provided by the Unified CCX Application
Administration interface. Cisco Unified CCX exposes sophisticated control of the contact center application
management with its Configuration REST APIs. For more information on supported APIs, see Cisco Unified
Contact Center Express Developer Guide available here:
https://developer.cisco.com/site/collaboration/contact-center/uccxapi/overview/

Remote Expert Mobile


For all information about the Remote Expert Mobile deployment, see the Cisco Contact Center Solutions and
Unified Communications Manager Solution Configuration Guide for Remote Expert Mobile, available at http:/
/www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/remote-expert-mobile/
tsd-products-support-series-home.html.

Post Call Treatment


Post Call Treatment allows Unified CCX to provide treatment to an ICD call once the agent ends the call from
the Finesse desktop. The Unified CCX administrator has an option to configure the Post Call Treatment via
the Cisco Unified CCX Script Editor. This functionality will not be available if the agent ends the call from
the phone or when the customer hangs up before the agent.

Purge Enhancement
This feature enhances the existing feature of purging the database. The administrator can now set the purge
duration for a scheduled purge in Unified CCX Administration in addition to the purge start time. The
enhancement also allows the administrator to configure to initiate an automatic purge when the extent size
exceeds the set limits.

Security
SSL HTTPS Connection
The certificates uploaded using the Cisco Unified OS Administration interface to the Tomcat trust store is
available to secure all HTTP connections made during script execution. The following can be secured:
• Document steps
• VoiceXML script
• Custom java code that provides web services

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Caller ID Support

Enhanced Security API (ESAPI)


A new security filter is added to the Application Administration component. This filter identifies malicious
user input and protects the application against XSS attacks.
If the Application Administration users find any user activity that was allowed earlier is now blocked by the
security filter, then disable the security filter using a CLI command. For more information, see the Cisco
Unified Contact Center Express Operations Guide, located at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/
custcosw/ps1846/prod_maintenance_guides_list.html.

Caller ID Support
Caller ID feature displays the caller's number instead of the CTI port number on the agent's IP phone. Caller
ID (CLID) is disabled by default. To enable CLID using a CLI command, see the Cisco Unified Contact
Center Express Operations Guide, located at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/
prod_maintenance_guides_list.html.

Note • CLID is not supported with Jabber.


• When the CLID screen pops up on the phone screen, the Answer key is hidden below the CLID
screen. You see two soft keys: Update and Exit. Press Exit to see the Answer key.

E.164 Support
Unified CCX supports E.164 numbering plan for route point directory numbers, and Finesse agent and
supervisor extensions. Unified CCX E.164 numbers support the plus sign (+) followed by up to 15 characters
that consist of numerals and the special characters—alphabet X, hash(#), square brackets ([ ]), hyphen (-),
and asterisk (*). E.164 is supported for the following components:
• CTI port directory numbers
• Contact phone numbers for outbound calls
• Cisco Finesse
• Trigger directory numbers
• Agent extensions
• Display of Incoming calls
• Phonebook and keypad
• Route points
• Configuration APIs for route points
• Script editor

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Context Service

Context Service
Cisco Context Service is a cloud-based omnichannel solution for Cisco Contact Center Express and Contact
Center Enterprise. It enables you to capture your customer’s interaction history by providing flexible storage
of customer-interaction data across any channel.
Context Service works out of the box with Cisco Customer Collaboration products. Context Service also
provides an SDK interface for integration with your own applications or third-party applications to capture
end-to-end customer-interaction data.
For more information about Context Service and to check service availability, see http://docwiki.cisco.com/
wiki/Context_Service.

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CHAPTER 4
Design Considerations
• Principal Design Considerations for Call Center Sizing, page 76
• Preliminary Information Requirements, page 77
• Terminology, page 78
• Effect of Performance Criteria on Unified CCX Server, page 79
• Impact of Performance Criteria on the Unified CM Servers, page 79
• Estimating Bandwidth Consumption, page 80
• Context Service Performance Considerations, page 96
• Reporting Scaling Considerations, page 96
• Server Capacities and Limits, page 97
• Load Balancing for Finesse, page 101
• IPv6 Support, page 102
• Unified CCX Software Compatibility, page 102
• Deployment Guidelines for Agent Phones that Support G.722 or iLBC, page 103

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Principal Design Considerations for Call Center Sizing

Principal Design Considerations for Call Center Sizing


This figure illustrates the principal steps and design considerations for sizing a call center.

Figure 14: Unified CCX Design Process – Call Center Sizing

This figure is a general overview of the design considerations for call sizing. For a detailed description of the
call center sizing design process, refer to the section on sizing call center resources in the Cisco Unified
Contact Center Enterprise Solution Reference Network Design Guide, available online at the following URL:
http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd
There are similar basic call center sizing considerations and steps for Unified CCE, and they also can be used
in sizing a smaller contact center for Unified CCX. This call-sizing approach will provide you with the
minimum number of IVR ports to support the total BHCA.
In addition, you should include the following design considerations, specific to Unified CCX, in your call
center sizing calculations:
• At a minimum, plan on enough capacity to replace your existing system. The replacement system should
perform at least as well as the one it is replacing.
• After all of the Erlang (C and B) calculations are complete for the call center sizing, any changes in
queue times or agents will affect the total number of trunks and IVR ports required for an Unified CCX
solution.
• As you increase the size of the agent pool, very small changes in the average queue time and percentage
of queued calls will affect the required number of gateway trunks and IVR ports.
• Even if you perform all of the calculations for a call center, there are still some variables that you cannot
plan for but that will affect the ports needed on a Unified CCX system. For example, one or more agents
could call in sick, and that would affect the port count and queue time for each call. Just two agents
calling in sick could increase the port count by over 12 percent. This would affect the price of the system
and, if not planned for, would affect the ability of the call center to meet caller requirements. Properly
sizing call center resources is integral to designing an effective Unified CCX system.

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Preliminary Information Requirements

Note Not all of the Unified CCX system limits are available at the same time.

If all of the call sizing information is available, the next step is to apply Unified CCX sizing limits to the call
center requirements. For this step, use the Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool, available online at:
http://tools.cisco.com/cucst
The Unified Communications downloadable sizing tools help you with the task of sizing Unified
Communications deployments.

Preliminary Information Requirements


System designers are advised to create a sizing document to do the following:
• Scope out the preliminary configuration information for the Unified CCX server.
• Size the gateways for the system.

To determine the size of the call center, obtain answers to the following questions:
• How many IVR ports do you need?
• How many PSTN gateway trunk ports do you need?
• How many agents will answer incoming calls?

To answer these questions properly, you will need the sizing metrics and information listed in the following
table.

Table 23: Call Center Sizing Metrics

Metric Description
Average handle time (AHT) Average duration (talk time) of a call plus after-call
work time, which is the wrap-up time after the caller
hangs up.

Average IVR port usage time The total time for prompt playout and/or menu
navigation (if any) in the Unified CCX script. This
time should not include the queue time the caller
spends waiting in queue before an agent becomes
available. Queue time is calculated using Erlang-C
automatically.

Service level goal for agents Percentage of calls answered by agents within a
specific number of seconds.

Busy Hour Call Attempts (BHCA) Average number of calls received in a busy hour.

Grade of service (% blockage) for gateway ports to Percentage of calls that get a busy tone (no gateway
the PSTN trunks available) out of the total BHCA.

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Terminology

All of the metrics in this table are basic call-sizing metrics. After this information is obtained, calculate the
number of gateway trunk ports, IVR ports, and agents using standard Erlang B and C calculators.

Note If the system being designed is a replacement for an existing ACD or an expansion to an installed Unified
CCX or Cisco Unified IP IVR system, you might be able to use the historical reporting information from
the existing system to arrive at the above metrics.

In addition, call sizing design considerations may vary if the call center is more self-service oriented.

Terminology
This figure illustrates the common port types and how they map to Unified CCX.

Figure 15: Call Center Port Types

Call center sizing differentiates the port types as follows:


• Gateway or PSTN trunk ports — Handles calls originating from the PSTN. They are purchased
separately from Unified CCX.
• Queue ports — IVR ports that queue calls (when no agents are available) prior to transferring the caller
to an available agent. These ports are included at no additional cost with Unified CCX Standard or
Enhanced, but they must be sized for proper capacity planning for the Unified CCX server.
• IVR ports — Full-featured IVR ports available with the Cisco Unified IP IVR and Unified CCX Premium
product.

If you want additional supporting features, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS),
email notification, web server or client functionality, and database operations, you only need to purchase the
Premium package. Additional seats may also be purchased for IVR port licenses if the number of port licenses
that come with the seat licenses is not sufficient.

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Effect of Performance Criteria on Unified CCX Server

The Unified CCX architecture differs slightly from the example TDM call center configuration in that IVR
ports and queue ports (and P&C ports as well) are combined into one logical CTI port as shown in the figure
above.

Effect of Performance Criteria on Unified CCX Server


System performance criteria fall into two general categories:
• Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR components — Applications, software versions, capabilities,
server types, and options and quantities that your system requires.
• System usage — The average number of calls placed and received per hour, the average call length, the
scripts being executed, and the grammar used for ASR.

Effect of Performance Criteria


Each performance criterion can have an effect on the performance of the Unified CCX or Cisco Unified IP
IVR system. In general, the more Unified CCX or Cisco Unified IP IVR components that you install and the
heavier the system usage, the higher the demand on the server. However, the performance criteria can also
interact in various non-linear ways to affect performance. The Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool
for Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR can help you see and evaluate the effects of performance criteria
on the Unified CCX and Cisco Unified IP IVR server.
Network latency between the following components affects the response time:
• Media path between the end customer and the agent via SocialMiner.
• Signaling path between the customer browser and Unified CCX via SocialMiner.

The customer chat interface retrieves updates in batches with a maximum delay of 5 seconds between batches.

Impact of Performance Criteria on the Unified CM Servers


Unified CM system performance is influenced by many criteria such as:
• Software release versions— Using the Cisco Unified Communications sizing tool, make sure to select
the Unified Communications Manager software version with which Unified CCX will be working.
• The type and quantity of devices registered such as:
◦CTI ports (IP IVR ports for queuing, call treatment, and self-service)
◦Gateway (GW) ports
◦Agent phones
◦Route points

• The load processed by these devices (calls per second)


• Application call flows
◦IVR self-service

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Estimating Bandwidth Consumption

◦Call treatment/Prompt and collect


◦Routing to agents, % transfers and conferences

• Special Unified Communications Manager configuration and services


◦Other non-Unified CCX devices—IP phones, GW ports, Unity ports, and dial plan.
◦Music on Hold (MOH)
◦Tracing levels— Unified Communications Manager CPU resource consumption varies depending
on the trace level enabled. Changing trace level from Default to Full on Unified CM can increase
CPU consumption significantly under high loads. Changing tracing level from Default to No tracing
can also decrease CPU consumption significantly at high loads (this configuration is not supported
by Cisco TAC). CPU consumption due to default trace will vary based on load, Unified
Communications Manager release, applications installed, and call flow complexity.

• Server platform type

Estimating Bandwidth Consumption


Bandwidth plays a large role in deployments involving:
• The centralized call processing model (Unified CCX at the central site)
• Any call deployment model that uses call admission control or a gatekeeper

Remote Agent Traffic Profile


Unified CCX signaling represents only a very small portion of control traffic (Agent and Supervisor Desktop
to and from the Unified CCX Server) in the network. For information on TCP ports and Differentiated Services
Code Point (DSCP) marking for Unified CCX and CTI traffic.
Bandwidth estimation becomes an issue when voice is included in the calculation. Because WAN links are
usually the lowest-speed circuits in an IP Telephony network, particular attention must be given to reducing
packet loss, delay, and jitter where voice traffic is sent across these links. G.729 is the preferred codec for use
over the WAN because the G.729 method for sampling audio introduces the least latency (only 30 milliseconds)
in addition to any other delays caused by the network.
Where voice is included in bandwidth, system architects should consider the following factors:
• Total delay budget for latency (taking into account WAN latency, serialization delays for any local area
network traversed, and any forwarding latency present in the network devices). The generally agreed-upon
limit for total (one-way) latency for applications in a network is 150 milliseconds.
• Impact of delays inherent in the applications themselves. The average Unified CCX agent login time
with no WAN delay is 8 seconds. This includes the exchange of approximately 1,000 messages between
the agent application and various servers. The overall time to log in agents increases by approximately
30 seconds for each 30 milliseconds of WAN delay.
• Impact of routing protocols. For example, Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) uses
quick convergence times and conservative use of bandwidth. EIGRP convergence also has a negligible
impact on call processing and Unified CCX agent logins.

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IP Call Bandwidth Usage

• Method used for silently monitoring and recording agent calls. The method used dictates the bandwidth
load on a given network link.

Use the following table to estimate the number of Unified CCX agents that can be maintained across the WAN
(with IP Telephony QoS enabled). These numbers are derived from testing where an entire call session to
Unified CCX agents, including G.729 RTP streams, is sent across the WAN. Approximately 30 percent of
bandwidth is provisioned for voice. Voice drops are more of an issue when you are running RTP in conjunction
with Cisco Finesse and other background traffic across the WAN. These voice drops might occur with a
specific number of agents at a certain link speed, and those possible scenarios are denoted by the entry N/A
(not applicable) in the following table.

Table 24: Remote Agents Supported by Unified CCX Across a WAN Link

Frame Relay 128 KB 256 KB 512 KB 768 KB T1


G.729 3 7 15 25 38

G. 711 N/A N/A N/A N/A 14

In remote agent deployments, QoS mechanisms should be used to optimize WAN bandwidth utilization.
Advanced queuing and scheduling techniques should be used in distribution and core areas as well. For
provisioning guidelines for centralized call processing deployments, refer to the Cisco IP Telephony Solution
Reference Network Design documentation, available online at: http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd.

IP Call Bandwidth Usage


An IP phone call consists of two streams of data. One stream is sent from phone A to phone B. The other
stream is sent from phone B to phone A. The voice data is encapsulated into packets that are sent over the
network. The amount of data required to store a voice stream is dependent upon the CODEC used to encode
the data.
The voice data itself is transmitted over the network using the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP). The RTP
protocol supports silence suppression. When silence suppression is used, no voice packets are sent over the
network if there is no sound.
Otherwise, even packets that contain silence are sent. This situation lowers the average required bandwidth
for a call. Although it supports silence suppression, the lower bandwidth requirements for silence suppression
should not be used when provisioning the network because the worst case scenario would be where there is
not silence in the call, requiring the full call bandwidth as if silence suppression was not enabled.
When calculating bandwidth for an IP call, you must use the size of the RTP packet plus the additional overhead
of the networking protocols used to transport the RTP data through the network.
For example, G.711 packets carrying 20 ms of speech data require 64 kbps (kilobytes per second) of network
bandwidth per stream. These packets are encapsulated by four layers of networking protocols (RTP, UDP,
IP, and Ethernet). Each of these protocols adds its own header information to the G.711 data. As a result, the
G.711 data, once packed into an Ethernet frame, requires 87.2 kbps of bandwidth per data stream as it travels
over the network. Because an IP phone call consists of two voice streams, in this example, a call would require
174.4 kbps.
The amount of voice data in a single packet also influences the size of the packet and bandwidth. The example
above used packets containing 20 milliseconds of speech for its calculations, but this value can be changed

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in the Unified CM configuration for each supported CODEC. Configuring packets to contain more speech
information reduces the number of packets sent over the network and reduces the bandwidth because there
are fewer packets containing the additional networking headers, but the packet sizes increase.
The following table shows the bandwidth required for a phone call for the different combinations of CODEC
and amount of speech per packet.

Table 25: Per-call Packet Size Bandwidth Requirements

CODEC Milliseconds of speech per packet Bandwidth required (Kbps) for a


call
G.711 10 220.8

G.711 20 174.4

G.711 30 159.0

G.729 10 108.8

G.729 20 62.4

G.729 30 47.0

G.729 40 39.2

G.729 50 34.6

G.729 60 31.4

Note • The calculations are based on G.711 using a sampling rate of 64 kbps speech encoding and the G.729
using 8 kbps. This means one second of speech encoded into the G.711 CODEC requires 65,536
bits (or 8,192 bytes) to represent one second of sound.
• For full-duplex connections, the bandwidth speed applies to both incoming and outgoing traffic.
(For instance, for a 100-Mbps connection, there is 100 Mbps of upload bandwidth and 100 Mbps of
download bandwidth.) Therefore, an IP phone call consumes the bandwidth equivalent of a single
stream of data. In this scenario, a G.711 IP phone call with no silence suppression and containing
20 milliseconds of speech per packet requires 87.2 kbps (174.4 / 2) of the available bandwidth.
• Unified CCX supports a-law and μ-law for G.711.
• If a prompt is recorded with G711 a-law phones and uploaded, you may encounter an error while
playing the recorded prompt.

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Bandwidth Available for Monitoring and Recording

Bandwidth Available for Monitoring and Recording


The following tables display the percentage of total bandwidth available, based on the network connection,
which is required for simultaneous monitoring sessions handled by a VoIP provider.

Table 26: Available Upload Bandwidth Percentage for Simultaneous Monitoring Sessions with G.711 CODEC

Number of Percentage of Available Bandwidth Required (No Silence Suppression)


Simultaneous
Monitoring 100 Mbps 10 Mbps 1.544 640 kbps 256 kbps 128 kbps 64 kbps 56 kbps
Sessions Mbps

Call only 0.1 0.9 5.6 13.6 34.1 68.1 Not supported (NS)5

1 0.3 2.6 16.8 40.9 NS NS NS NS

2 0.4 4.4 28.1 68.1 NS NS NS NS

3 0.6 6.1 39.3 95.4 NS NS NS NS

4 0.8 7.8 50.5 NS NS NS NS NS

5 1.0 9.6 61.7 NS NS NS NS NS

6 1.1 11.3 72.9 NS NS NS NS NS

7 1.3 13.1 84.2 NS NS NS NS NS

8 1.5 14.8 95.4 NS NS NS NS NS

9 1.7 16.6 NS NS NS NS NS NS

10 1.8 18.3 NS NS NS NS NS NS

5 The bandwidth of the connection is not large enough to support the number of simultaneous monitoring sessions.

Table 27: Available Upload Bandwidth Percentage for Simultaneous Monitoring Sessions with G.711 CODEC

Number of Percentage of Available Bandwidth Required (No Silence Suppression)


Simultaneous
Monitoring 100 Mbps 10 Mbps 1.544 Mbps 640 kbps 256 kbps 128 kbps 64 kbps
Sessions
Call only 0.0 0.3 2.0 4.9 12.2 24.4 48.8

1 0.1 0.9 6.0 14.6 36.6 73.1 Not


supported
(NS)6

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Number of Percentage of Available Bandwidth Required (No Silence Suppression)


Simultaneous
Monitoring 100 Mbps 10 Mbps 1.544 Mbps 640 kbps 256 kbps 128 kbps 64 kbps
Sessions
2 0.2 1.6 10.0 24.4 60.9 NS NS

3 0.2 2.2 14.1 34.1 85.3 NS NS

4 0.3 2.8 18.1 43.9 NS NS NS

5 0.3 3.4 22.1 53.6 NS NS NS

6 0.4 4.1 26.1 63.4 NS NS NS

7 0.5 4.7 30.1 73.1 NS NS NS

8 0.5 5.3 34.1 82.9 NS NS NS

9 0.6 5.9 38.1 92.6 NS NS NS

10 0.7 6.6 42.2 NS NS NS NS

6 The bandwidth of the connection is not large enough to support the number of simultaneous monitoring sessions.

The following notes apply to the bandwidth requirements shown in the previous tables:
• The bandwidth values are calculated based on the best speed of the indicated connections. A connection's
true speed can differ from the maximum stated due to various factors.
• The bandwidth requirements are based on upload speed. Download speed affects only the incoming
stream for the IP phone call.
• The values are based upon each voice packet containing 20 milliseconds of speech.
• The number of bytes in each packet include the entire Ethernet encapsulation.
• The data represents the CODECs without silence suppression. With silence suppression, the amount of
bandwidth used may be lower.
• The data shown does not address the quality of the speech of the monitored call. If the bandwidth
requirements approach the total bandwidth available and other applications must share access to the
network, latency (packet delay) of the voice packets can affect the quality of the monitored speech.
However, latency does not affect the quality of recorded speech.
• The data represents only the bandwidth required for monitoring and recording. It does not include the
bandwidth requirements for Cisco Finesse.

Web Chat Feature


When deploying the Unified CCX along with Cisco SocialMiner, observe the following network requirements:

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Delay— The maximum allowed round-trip time (RTT) between the Unified CCX server and SocialMiner is
150 ms.
Bandwidth— In addition to the requirements for the Unified CCX and Unified CM clusters, you must
provision sufficient bandwidth for SocialMiner, the customer web server, and remote agent/supervisor desktops
to deploy Web Chat successfully. You must take into account the bandwidth required for the following
components:
• Unified CCX and SocialMiner— If SocialMiner and the Unified CCX are not co-located, there is an
additional bandwidth requirement for the communication and contact signaling.
• SocialMiner and Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop— When a chat session starts, depending on the chat
transcript size and communication frequency, there is an additional bandwidth requirement between
SocialMiner and the Cisco Finesse Agent Desktop.
• SocialMiner and customer website— The customer website transfers all new chat contact requests to
SocialMiner. When the chat contact reaches SocialMiner, an active session is maintained and when a
chat begins, the chat agent and the customer website have to and from data traffic to carry chat messages.
If the customer website is not on the same network as SocialMiner, you must ensure that the bandwidth
requirement is based on mean per session chat traffic.

The following table shows the minimum bandwidth requirement for the Unified CCX and SocialMiner when
they are not located in the same network.

Note These numbers depend on overall network efficiency.

Between Unified Between Unified Between Between Customer


CCX and CCX and Agent SocialMiner and Web Server and
SocialMiner (KBps) Desktop (KBps) Agent Desktop SocialMiner (KBps)
(KBps)
Actual data 3.35 1 4.02 2 12 3 12 3
bandwidth

Data bandwidth 40 40 100 100


considering HTTP
traffic and other
factors

1
Allocate network bandwidth for signal communication based on this formula:
Signaling network bandwidth (in KBps) = Number of new chat sessions per second × Number of messages
per chat session × Average message size
Example
If you have a Busy Hour Call Completion (BHCC) of 2400 (maximum supported) with an average chat
duration of 3 minutes, you will have 0.67 chat sessions per second. On average, if each chat session has five
messages for state signaling and contact injection and each message is 1 KB (500 characters), then bandwidth
utilization is 0.67 × 5 ×1 KBps = 3.35 KBps.
2
Allocate network bandwidth for signal communication based on this formula:

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Finesse Agent Email Feature

Signaling network bandwidth (in KBps) = Number of new chat sessions per second × Number of messages
per chat session × Average message size
Example
If you have a BHCC of 2400 (maximum supported) with an average chat duration of 3 minutes, you will have
0.67 chat sessions per second. On average, if each chat session has 3 messages and each message is 2 KB
(1000 characters), bandwidth utilization is 0.67 × 3 × 2 KBps = 4.02 KBps.
3
Allocate network bandwidth for chat based on this formula:
Chat network bandwidth (in KBps) = Chat sessions sending message per second × Average message size
Example
If all of the120 sessions are active and 10 percent of the chat sessions are sending messages every second,
120 × 10 / 100 = 12 chat sessions are sending a message each second.
If the average message size is 1 KB (500 characters), the chat network bandwidth is 12 KBps.

Finesse Agent Email Feature


When you deploy Unified CCX along with Cisco SocialMiner, observe the following network requirements:
Delay—The maximum allowed round-trip time (RTT) between the Unified CCX server and SocialMiner is
150 ms.
Bandwidth—In addition to the requirements for the Unified CCX and Unified Communications Manager
clusters, you must provision sufficient bandwidth for SocialMiner, the mail server, and remote agent/supervisor
desktops to deploy Finesse Agent Email successfully.
The following table shows the minimum bandwidth requirement for Unified CCX and SocialMiner when
they are not located in the same network.

Note These numbers depend on overall network efficiency.

Between Unified CCX and SocialMiner (KBps)


Actual data bandwidth 0.67 1

Data bandwidth considering HTTP traffic and other 40


factors

1
Allocate network bandwidth for signal communication based on this formula:
Signaling network bandwidth (in KBps) = Number of new email sessions per second × Number of messages
per email session × Average message size
Example
If you have 400 emails (maximum supported) per hour, you will have 0.11 email sessions per second. On
average, if each email session has six messages for state signaling and contact injection and each message is
1 KB (500 characters), then bandwidth utilization is 0.11 x 6 x 1 KB = 0.67 KBps.

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Between Unified CCX and Agent Desktop (KBps)


Actual data bandwidth 2.22 2

Data bandwidth considering HTTP traffic and other 40


factors

2
Allocate network bandwidth for signal communication based on this formula:
Signaling network bandwidth (in KBps) = Number of new email sessions per second × Number of messages
per email session × Average message size
Example
If you have 400 emails (maximum supported) per hour and an agent can handle five concurrent emails, you
will have 0.11 emails per second. The agent can requeue or respond to that email directly. Assuming on
average 10% of email messages are requeued and there are 100 Email CSQs in the system, three messages,
each 1 KB, and the requeue list message is 10 KB, the bandwidth requirement is calculated as follows:
network bandwidth (in KBps) = number of concurrent emails x number of new email sessions per second x
[(number of messages per email session x average message size) + (percentage of emails requeued x size of
requeue list message)]
5 x 0.11 x ((3 x 1 KB) + (0.1 x 10 KB)) = 2.22 KBps

Finesse Agent Email Flow


There are four types of Finesse Agent Email flows that exist between the Finesse Agent Desktop, SocialMiner,
and the Exchange Server.
• Basic Email flow—No attachments and no requeue.
• Email with attachments flow—The customer's email contains attachments and the agent's reply has
attachments.
• Email requeue flow—The customer's email is sent to another queue.
• Email requeue with attachments flow—The customer's email contains attachments. The email is requeued
and the agent's reply contains attachments.

The flows listed above represent the extreme cases which makes the calculations conservative.
Requeues and attachments are expected to occur 10% of the time. The maximum number of emails per hour
is 400. The occurrence of each type of flow is determined by first calculating the number of basic and requeue
flows followed by the number of basic and requeue flows that contain attachments:
• Total basic email flow = Maximum email per hour – [maximum email per hour x (requeue percent /
100)]
◦Email with attachments flow = total basic email flow x (attachment percent / 100)
◦Basic email flow = total basic email flow – email with attachments flow

• Total email requeue flow = Maximum email per hour x (requeue percent / 100)
◦Email requeue with attachments flow = total email requeue flow x (attachment percent / 100)

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◦Email requeue flow = total email requeue flow – email requeue with attachments flow

After considering the maximum values, the calculation is:


• Total basic email flow = 360
◦Email with attachments flow = 36
◦Basic email flow = 324

• Total email requeue flow = 40


◦Email requeue with attachments flow = 4
◦Email requeue flow = 36

Each of the flows has a set of messages with different bandwidth requirements. The requirements are derived
based on the following constants:
• Customer email size = 6 KB
• Attachment size = 5120 KB
• Agent reply size = 6 KB
• SLA = 60 minutes
• Save draft interval = 3 minutes

Finesse Agent Desktop and SocialMiner


If SocialMiner and Unified CCX are not co-located, additional bandwidth is required for communication and
contact signaling.

Between Finesse Agent Desktop and SocialMiner


Actual data bandwidth 3560160 KB per hour

Data bandwidth considering HTTP traffic and other 1024 KBps


factors

Example
Using an email size of 6 KB and an agent reply of 6 KB, the bandwidth requirements for the set of messages
between the Finesse Agent Desktop and SocialMiner for each flow is as follows:
• Basic email flow = 6288 KB
◦Load UI files into Finesse = 6144 KB
◦Signaling = 6 KB
◦Get email body = 6 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB

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◦send reply = customer email size + agent reply size = 12 KB

• Email with attachments flow = 31888 KB


◦Load UI files into Finesse = 6144 KB
◦Signaling = 6 KB
◦Get email body with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦Customer attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments upload = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Send reply with attachments = customer email size + agent reply size + attachment size = 5132
KB

• Email requeue flow = 6300 KB


◦Load UI files into Finesse = 6144 KB
◦Signaling (get contact + reserve contact) = 4 KB
◦Get email body = 6 KB
◦Requeue = 2 KB
◦Signaling (requeue + get contact + reserve contact) = 6 KB
◦Get email body = 6 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦Send reply = customer email size + agent reply size = 12 KB

• Email requeue with attachments flow = 37020 KB


◦Load UI files into Finesse = 6144 KB
◦Signaling (get contact + reserve contact) = 6 KB
◦Get email body with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126 KB
◦Signaling (requeue + get contact + reserve contact) = 6 KB
◦Get email body with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦Customer attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments upload = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Send reply with attachments = (customer email size + agent reply size + attachment size) = 5132
KB

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At 400 emails per hour, the bandwidth for each flow is as follows:
• Basic email flow = 6288 KB x 324 = 2037312 KB
• Email with attachments flow = 31888 KB x 36 = 1147968 KB
• Email requeue flow = 6300 KB x 36 = 226800 KB
• Email requeue with attachments flow = 37020 KB x 4 = 148080 KB

The total bandwidth is 3560160 KB per hour. The bandwidth in KBps between the Finesse Agent Desktop
and SocialMiner is 1024 KBps.

SocialMiner and Mail Server


SocialMiner must retrieve emails, save drafts, and send emails from the Finesse Agent Desktop to the mail
server. If the mail server is not on the same network as SocialMiner, you must ensure that the bandwidth
requirement is based on mean per-session email traffic.

Between SocialMiner and Mail Server (KBps)


Actual data bandwidth 1516720 KB per hour

Data bandwidth considering HTTP traffic and other 512 KBps


factors

Example
Using an email size of 6 KB and an agent reply of 6 KB, the bandwidth requirements for the set of messages
between the SocialMiner and mail server for each flow is as follows:
• Basic email flow = 156 KB
◦Initial fetch of customer email = 6 KB
◦Get email body = 6 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦send = 2 x (customer email size + agent reply size) = 24 KB

• Email with attachments flow = 35996 KB


◦Initial fetch of customer email with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126
KB
◦Get email body with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦Customer attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments upload = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Send reply with attachments = 2 x (customer email size + agent reply size + attachment size) =
10264 KB

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• Email requeue flow = 162 KB


◦Initial fetch of customer email = 6 KB
◦Get email body = 6 KB
◦Get email body after requeue = 6 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦Send reply = 2 x (customer email size + agent reply size) = 24 KB

• Email requeue with attachments flow = 41122 KB


◦Initial fetch of customer email with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126
KB
◦Get email body with attachments = customer email size + attachment size = 5126 KB
◦Get email body with attachments afer requeue = customer email size + attachment size = 5126 KB
◦Save draft = agent reply size x (SLA / save draft interval) = 120 KB
◦Customer attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments upload = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Agent attachments download = attachment size = 5120 KB
◦Send reply with attachments = 2 x (customer email size + agent reply size + attachment size) =
10264 KB

At 400 emails per hour, the bandwidth for each flow is as follows:
• Basic email flow = 156 KB x 324 = 50544
• Email with attachments flow = 35996 KB x 36 = 1295856
• Email requeue flow = 162 KB x 36 = 5832 KB
• Email requeue with attachments flow = 41122 KB x 4 = 164488 KB

The total bandwidth is 1516720 KB per hour. The bandwidth in KBps between SocialMiner and the mail
server is 512 KBps.

Security
Security can be implemented on many levels. Applications security is dependent upon security implemented
at the infrastructure level. For more details on security at the network infrastructure level, refer to the security
design considerations in the Cisco IP Telephony Solution Reference Network Design documentation, available
here:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/largeent/it/ese/srnd.html

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QoS and Call Admission Control

Corporate Data Access


In addition to call routing, Unified CCX or Cisco Unified IP IVR scripts often process enterprise data from
existing corporate data stores such as a database or a corporate directory server for functions such as account
authorization and order status. These data stores often already exist and share data with other enterprise
applications.
This figure shows an example of a network where voice and data components reside in separate VLANs and
are separated by a firewall.

Figure 16: Unified CCX Accessing Data Stores

Unified CCX can communicate with these external sources through its subsystems, provided that Network
Address Translation (NAT) is not used.

QoS and Call Admission Control


Quality of service (QoS) becomes an issue when more voice and application-related traffic is added to an
already growing amount of data traffic on your network. Accordingly, Unified CCX and time-sensitive traffic
such as voice need higher QoS guarantees than less time-sensitive traffic such as file transfers or emails
(particularly if you are using a converged network).
QoS should be used to assign different qualities to data streams to preserve Unified CCX mission-critical and
voice traffic. The following are some examples of available QoS mechanisms:
• Packet classification and usage policies applied at the edge of the network, such as Policy Based Routing
(PBR) and Committed Access Rate (CAR).
• End-to-end queuing mechanisms, such as Low Latency Queuing (LLQ). Because voice is susceptible
to increased latency and jitter on low-speed links, Link Fragmentation and Interleaving (LFI) can also
be used to reduce delay and jitter by subdividing large datagrams and interleaving low-delay traffic with
the resulting smaller packets.
• Scheduling mechanisms such as Traffic Shaping to optimize bandwidth utilization on output links.

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Unified CCX and Application-Related Traffic


The table lists TCP ports and DSCP markings for use in prioritizing Unified CCX and Unified CM
mission-critical CTI traffic. The DSCP markings for call signaling traffic between Unified CCX and Cisco
Unified Communication Manager and for voice traffic played from the Unified CCX server are set by default
according to the recommended traffic classification guidelines documented in Cisco Unified Communications
System Design Guidance, available here:
http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd.
Unified CCX does not mark any network traffic other than those mentioned here. As a result, traffic should
be marked and prioritized at the edge according to the recommendations in the table.
The performance criteria used in classifying this traffic includes:
• No packet drops on the outbound or inbound interface of the WAN edge router
• Voice (G.729) loss under 1percent
• One-way voice delay under 150 ms

A detailed description of QoS is not within the scope of this design guide. For QoS design recommendations,
refer to the quality of service design guide available here:
http://www.cisco.com/go/designzone

Table 28: Recommended QoS Classifications for Unified CCX Interfaces

Unified CCX Component Interface / Port DSCP Marking


Protocol
Unified CCX Engine — CTI-QBE messaging CTI-QBE TCP 2748 CS3
destined to Unified CM from Unified CCX

Unified CCX Administration and BIPPA Service HTTP / TCP 8443 AF21
— HTTP traffic destined for web administration HTTPS
and BIPPA interface on Unified CCX

Unified CCX Engine and Unified CCX HTTPS / TCP 8443 AF21
Administration — SOAP AXL HTTPS messaging SOAP
destined to Unified CM from Unified CCX

Unified CCX Engine — CTI messaging destined CTI TCP 12028 CS3
to Unified CCX from CAD clients

Unified CCX Engine — RTP voice bearer traffic RTP UDP 16384 - 32767 EF
(bi-directional)

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CAC and RSVP

CAC and RSVP


Unified CM supports Resource-Reservation Protocol (RSVP) between endpoints within a cluster. RSVP is a
protocol used for Call Admission Control (CAC) and is used by the routers in the network to reserve bandwidth
for calls. The bandwidth being controlled is only for the voice streams, call signalling traffic is not part of
CAC.
Before RSVP, each Unified CM cluster maintained its own calculation of how many active calls were traversing
between locations in order to calculate bandwidth usage. If more than one Unified CM cluster shared the same
link, bandwidth would have to be carved out and dedicated for each cluster, and this led to inefficient use of
available bandwidth. RSVP also enables customers to deploy complex network topology while location-based
CAC is limited to a hub-and-spoke type of topology.
RSVP solves this problem by tracing the path between two RSVP Agents that reside on the same LAN as the
IP Phones. A software MTP or transcoder resource that runs on Cisco IOS routers can be RSVP Agents. The
RSVP Agents are controlled by Unified CM and are inserted into the media stream between the two IP phones
when a call is made. The RSVP Agent of the originating IP Phone will traverse the network to the destination
IP Phone's RSVP Agent, and reserve bandwidth. Since the network routers (and not Unified CM) are keeping
track of bandwidth usage, multiple phone calls can traverse the same RSVP controlled link even if the calls
are controlled by multiple Unified CMs.
For more information, see the RSVP chapter in Cisco Unified Communications Solution Reference Network
Design (SRND).
Unified CCX selects a call center agent independent of the mechanism, using either RSVP or location-based
CAC. Unified CCX routes a call to an available agent even though the agent phone might not be able to receive
the call due to lack of bandwidth. Proper sizing of bandwidth between sites is very important.
For any call transfer, there are moments when two calls are active. If any of the active calls traverses between
sites, then CAC is used. Even when the original call is placed on hold during a transfer, that call still takes up
the same amount of bandwidth just like an active call.
In the two examples that follow, the voice gateway and agents are at a remote site, while the Unified CCX
server is at a data center site. A call from PSTN reaches the voice gateway at the remote site and connects to
Unified CCX at the data center. This takes one call bandwidth over the WAN link, which is represented by

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the caller stream. Once an agent is available and selected at the remote site, Unified CCX transfers the call to
the agent.

Figure 17: Call From PSTN to Unified CCX Server to Agent

During the transfer, before the agent picks up the call, there is another call setup between Unified CCX and
the agent phone. It takes up another call bandwidth over the WAN, and is represented by the agent stream in
the previous example. Once the agent picks up the call, the voice traffic is between the voice gateway and the
agent phone, which are both at the remote site. At that time, no bandwidth is reserved over the WAN, as
illustrated in the following example. This example shows how call bandwidth is reserved in a contact center
call that is eventually routed to an agent. Depending on where the voice gateway, the agents, and the Unified
CCX server are located, proper WAN bandwidth should be provisioned.

Figure 18: After Agent Picks Up Call

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Bandwidth Security and QoS Considerations for Unified Intelligence Center


The two bandwidth measurements in a Unified Intelligence Center installation include the following:
• Bandwidth between the Unified Intelligence Center and data source
• Bandwidth between the user and Unified Intelligence Center

The Unified CCX database is local to the server. In a normal operating mode, the bandwidth between Unified
Intelligence Center and the data source can be ignored.

Note Each report requires about 2.6 Mbps of bandwidth between the user and Unified Intelligence Center.

The configuration parameters that affect bandwidth include the following:


• Number of rows in the report: 8000
• Size of each row: 500 bytes
• HTML size overhead for each row: 500 bytes
• Time to transfer the rendered report from Unified Intelligence Center to the browser: 3 seconds

Context Service Performance Considerations


In general, typical Context Service requests within the same geographical area take from 100ms to 300ms
and across the globe can take as long as 1.2 to 1.5 seconds.

Reporting Scaling Considerations


Following are the reporting considerations:
• A maximum live data load that can run is with 6000 BHCA (Busy Hour Call Attempts) along with 900
emails and 1500 chat.
• A maximum of eight reporting users logged in concurrently on Cisco Unified Intelligence Center can
view:
• Four Live Data reports with 50 rows of 10 fields refreshing every 3 seconds.
• Two historical reports with 2000 rows with 10 fields each refreshing every 30 minutes.

• A maximum of 42 Finesse supervisors can view:


• Three Live Data reports with 50 rows of 10 fields refreshing every 3 seconds.

• A maximum of 358 Finesse agents can view:


• Three real-time reports with 20 rows of 10 fields refreshing every 3 seconds.

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Server Capacities and Limits

Server Capacities and Limits


OVA Profile
The following table displays Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) configuration settings to be used for Unified
CCX:

Table 29: OVA Settings

Agent Capacity vCPU vRAM vDisk


100 agents 2 8 GB 1 x 146GB

300 agents 2 8 GB 2 x 146GB

400 agents 4 16 GB 2 x 146GB

The following table provides a selected list of capacity limits when deploying Unified CCX.

Table 30: Capacity Limits

Deployment Capacity
Maximum number of inbound agents 400

Maximum number of preview outbound agents 150

Maximum number of remote agents 100

Maximum number of supervisors 42

Maximum number of IVR ports 400

Maximum number of outbound IVR ports 400

Maximum number of progressive and predictive 150


outbound agents

This table shows absolute limits. Reaching the limits for multiple criteria in a specific configuration might
not be possible. Use the Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool to validate your configuration. This tool
is available at:
http://tools.cisco.com/cucst
The Cisco Unified Communications Sizing Tool is available to Cisco partners only. For more details and to
validate your configuration, contact your Cisco sales engineer or Cisco partner to access this tool.
For information on capacity and sizing of Cisco Workforce Optimization, refer to the Cisco Workforce
Optimization System Configuration Guide.

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The summary overview of system maximums for inbound and outbound voice listed in the table is for reference
only.

Table 31: Reference Capacities for Inbound Systems

Inbound-Only System Maximum Capacities


Standalone Server Two-Server Cluster

OVA profile 3 2 1 3 2 1

Agents 400 300 100 400 300 100

Supervisors 42 32 10 42 32 10

Finesse email 120 120 60 120 120 60

Web Chat concurrent sessions7 50 50 25 50 50 25

Web Chat concurrent sessions8 120 120 60 120 120 60

Web Chat volume per hour 2400 2400 1200 2400 2400 1200

Silent Monitoring 42 32 10 42 32 10

Recording and Playback using N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Finesse 9

Customer service queues 250 250 35 250 250 35

Skills 250 250 250 250 250 250

Historical reporting sessions 8 8 3 16 16 10

IVR ports10 400 300 100 400 300 100

ASR ports 100 100 50 100 100 50

TTS ports 160 160 40 160 160 40

VoiceXML ports 80 80 40 80 80 40

Busy Hour Call Completions 6000 5000 2000 6000 5000 2000
(BHCC)

Number of skills with which an 50 50 50 50 50 50


agent can associate

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Inbound-Only System Maximum Capacities


Number of CSQs with which an 25 25 25 25 25 25
agent can associate (includes
total combined email CSQs and
voice CSQs)

Number of skills with which a 50 50 50 50 50 50


CSQ can associate

Number of CSQs for which a 25 25 25 25 25 25


call can queue

Number of agents per team 50 50 50 50 50 50

Maximum CSQs for Agent 100 100 10 100 100 10


Email

7
Example; If your agent seat count is 100, you can have 25 chat sessions. If your agent seat count is 10, you can have 10 chat
sessions.
8
Example; If your OVA profile is 1, the agent seat count is 100, you can have 60 chat sessions. If your agent seat count is 10,
you can have 10 chat sessions.
9 The recording limit is based on the number of recording licenses deployed on Unified CCX. Appropriate capacity planning is required to perform recording
and playback on MediaSense. For more information see, Solution Reference Network Design for Cisco MediaSense available here: http://www.cisco.com/
en/US/products/ps11389/products_implementation_design_guides_list.html
10 The number of IVR ports is also limited by the maximum number supported for a given server platform. In case of virtualized deployment, the maximum
number of IVR ports is limited by the maximum number supported for a given virtual machine template.

Table 32: Reference Capacities for Blended Inbound and Outbound Systems

Blended Inbound and Outbound System Maximum Capacities


Standalone Server Two-Server Cluster

Agents 400 300 100 400 300 100

Supervisors 42 32 10 42 32 10

Silent Monitoring 42 32 10 42 32 10

Customer service queues 250 250 35 250 250 35

Skills 250 250 250 250 250 250

IVR ports 400 300 100 400 300 100

ASR ports 100 100 50 100 100 50

TTS ports 160 160 40 160 160 40

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Server Capacities and Limits

Blended Inbound and Outbound System Maximum Capacities


VoiceXML ports 80 80 40 80 80 40

Agent E-Mail concurrent agents 120 120 30 120 120 30

Web Chat concurrent sessions 120 120 60 120 120 60


11

Web Chat volume per hour 2400 2400 1200 2400 2400 1200

Blended or Preview Agents 150 150 75 150 150 75

Blended or 150 150 75 150 150 75


Progressive/Predictive Agents

Preview Outbound BHCC 6000 5000 2000 6000 5000 2000

Progressive and Predictive 6000 5000 2000 6000 5000 2000


Outbound BHCC

Outbound IVR BHCC 6000 5000 2000 6000 5000 2000

Total BHCC12 6000 5000 2000 6000 5000 2000

Number of skills with which an 50 50 50 50 50 50


agent can associate

Number of CSQs with which an 25 25 25 25 25 25


agent can associate

Number of skills with which a 50 50 50 50 50 50


CSQ can associate

Number of CSQs for which a 25 25 25 25 25 25


call can queue

Number of email CSQs 100 100 100 100 100 100

Outbound IVR ports 150 150 75 150 150 75

Maximum number of configured 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000 2000


agents

11
Example; If your OVA profile is 1, the agent seat count is 100, you can have 60 chat sessions. If your agent seat count is 10,
you can have 10 chat sessions.
12 For high-availability (HA) deployments, the BHCC listed in the table is for LAN deployments. For WAN deployments, BHCC is 5000, 750, and 750 for OVA
profile 3 and 2, and 1, respectively. In addition, the BHCC contributed by the preview outbound dialer should not exceed 1000, 750 and 750 for OVA profile
3, 2, and 1, respectively. The BHCC contributed by Outbound IVR should not exceed 1000 and 750 for OVA profile 3 and 2 respectively. These reduced
BHCCs apply only to HA over WAN deployments.

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Design Considerations
Load Balancing for Finesse

Note All the capacities stated in this section are system maximums.

Load Balancing for Finesse


After agents sign in to the Finesse desktop, the Finesse desktop client manages failover. For example, if a
Finesse server goes out of service, the Finesse client automatically redirects and signs the agent in to the other
Finesse server. The client can manage various network and server failure use cases. Given this client-side
logic, the use of a load balancer after sign-in is not required nor supported.
However, the following are two scenarios in which you can use a load balancer with Finesse.

Note These scenarios only apply to the Finesse desktop and not to Finesse IP Phone Agents.

When Agents Navigate to the Finesse Sign-In Page


If an agent attempts to navigate to a Finesse server that is down or not reachable, they cannot access the sign-in
page. The agent receives an error and must manually sign in to the other Finesse server. To avoid this manual
step, customers can use a load balancer using URL redirect mode to direct the agent to a Finesse server that
is operational. One option is to use the Finesse SystemInfo REST API, which provides the status of the Finesse
server. For details about this API, see the Cisco Finesse Web Services Developer Guide.
When you configure a load balancer to determine the status of the Finesse servers, the call flow is as follows:
1 When agents sign in to Finesse, they point their browsers to the load balancer.
2 The load balancer redirects the agent browser to an appropriate Finesse server.
3 The agent signs in to the Finesse server directly. At this stage, the load balancer is no longer part of the
call flow.

When Customers Use the Finesse API Directly


If a customer uses the Finesse REST API directly, the Finesse client-side failover logic is not in the call flow.
In this case, customers can opt to use a load balancer to manage high availability. This load balancer is
considered part of a custom application which, like all custom applications, Cisco does not support. The
customer or partner must provide the required support for the load balancer.
Before you configure the load balancer, remember that there are two connections between Finesse clients and
the Finesse server:
• A REST channel for request and response
• An XMPP channel that the server uses to send notifications to the client

Both channels for a given client must connect to the same Finesse server.
You cannot connect the load balancer to the REST connection for one Finesse server and to the XMPP channel
connection for the other Finesse server. This setup provides unpredictable results and is not supported.

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Design Considerations
IPv6 Support

IPv6 Support
Unified CCX does not support IPv6 but it can inter-operate with Unified CM running in IPv6. All CTI Ports,
CTI Route Points and agent phones have to be configured as IPv4 devices. Unified CCX servers, machines
running the agent desktop and other optional servers (for example, ASR/TTS, WFM, QM etc) should be
running in IPv4 segment, However, the calling device can be configured as either IPv4 or IPv6. Beware that
if the calling device is in IPv6 and the receiving device is in IPv4, Unified CM dynamically inserts a media
termination point (MTP) to convert the media between the two devices from IPv4 to IPv6 or vice versa. This
would have an impact on Unified CM performance.
For more information on IPv6 deployment with Unified CM, refer to the document Deploying IPv6 in Unified
Communications Networks with Cisco Unified Communications Manager available here:
http://www.cisco.com/go/ucsrnd

Unified CCX Software Compatibility


Unified CCX software is dependent upon integration with many other software components, especially Unified
CM. Check that the Unified CCX release you are planning is supported with the Unified CM release for which
this deployment is planned.
For the list of supported virtual servers for Unified CCX, see the Cisco Unified CCX Software and Hardware
Compatibility Guide available at: http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_CCX

Cisco Unified CCX Disk Space Usage


This section provides information about determining disk space usage and requirements when you install the
Unified CCX. The historical reporting (HR) database (DB) size of the Unified CCX depends on the size of
the hard disk on which it is stored. The following table provides an example of disk space usage for these DB
types.

Table 33: Cisco Unified CCX Disk Space Usage

Sever Type Server Disk Size HR DB Size Repository DB Agent DB Size Configuration
Size (rascal) DB Size
100 Agent VM 1x146 GB 10.78 GB 40 MB 0.5 GB 0.5 GB
profile

300 Agent VM 2x146 GB 12.45 GB 40 MB 0.5 GB 0.5 GB


profile

400 Agent VM 2x146 GB 18.91 GB 40 MB 0.5 GB 0.5 GB


profile

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Design Considerations
Deployment Guidelines for Agent Phones that Support G.722 or iLBC

Deployment Guidelines for Agent Phones that Support G.722 or


iLBC
Unified CCX can monitor and record only G.711 and G.729 agent calls. The newer version of some agent
phones for Unified CM and Unified CM support G.722 and iLBC. If both the calling device (voice gateway
or IP Phone) and agent phone support G.722 or iLBC, these codecs may be chosen as the preferred codec for
the call, and monitoring and recording will fail. In order to prevent these codecs from being used in the call,
the following configurations are recommended:

Unified CM
• Disable advertising G.722 codec capability for the agent phone if the phone
supports this codec.
• In the Region used by the agent phone, set the audio codec as G.711 or
G.729 only and do not set the Link Lossy Type as Lossy to prevent iLBC
from being used.

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APPENDIX A
Unified CCX Failover
The following table describes the persistent connection call behavior during the failover of Unified CCX
and Cisco Unified Communications Manager:

Failover Cisco Finesse


Persistent Connection Call ICD Call
Unified CCX failover Not terminated Not terminated
Cisco Unified Communications Manager Terminated Not terminated. The agent
failover enters the Not Ready state
Desktop connectivity loss Not terminated Not terminated

• Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), page 105


• Interactive Voice Response, page 106
• Unified CCX Outbound Dialer, page 106
• Engine Redundancy, page 107
• When WAN Link Between Data Centers is Down—Island Mode, page 107
• When the Master Engine is Down, page 108
• When WAN Link and One of the Engines is Down, page 108
• Unified CCX Failover, page 108
• Cisco Finesse Failover, page 109
• Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, page 110
• Web Chat, page 111

Automatic Call Distribution (ACD)


The HA failure of the active server is detected and the ACD subsystem can automatically fail over from the
active to the standby server. All ACD functions are restored on the standby server within 5 seconds.

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Interactive Voice Response

Interactive Voice Response


When an active server fails in a HA system, IVR subsystem will automatically failover.
All calls in queue and calls receiving IVR call treatment will be lost. Calls already transferred to the agent
will be preserved.

Unified CCX Outbound Dialer


Behavior Under High Availability
The Config Data Store (CDS) is required for normal operation of outbound for call status and call result
updates of contact records. When deploying in a two-node high availability system, the CDS must be running
on both nodes to enable the database write operation. The Outbound subsystem will be operational as long
as the Publisher CDS is up and running. In a high availability environment, only the dialer in the master node
is active.
The number of contacts that can be retried for each campaign is as mentioned below:
• For direct preview campaigns, the count is equal to the maximum value that is configured for Contact
Records Cache Size field.
• For IVR-based progressive and predictive campaigns, the count is equal to the Number of Dedicated
Ports multiplied with the Lines Per Port (LPP) values configured.
• For agent-based progressive and predictive campaigns, the count is equal to 45 for medium or large VM
profiles and is equal to 15 for small VM profiles.

Failover Scenarios for Preview Outbound:


• If a preview outbound call not in reserved state is waiting for the agent to accept the call and when the
master engine goes down, the agent is automatically logged out and the preview call disappears from
the agent desktop. If the master engine restarts during failover, the call status for that contact record is
set to unknown. If the master engine does not restart during failover, the contact is called when the
campaign starts and there are available agents.
• If a preview outbound call not in reserved state is accepted by the agent and the call is ringing on the
customer phone, there is no change on the call. However, the agent is logged out and will be able to use
call control capabilities only through the phone.
• If an agent is currently on a preview outbound call and the master engine goes down, then the agent is
logged out and is logged back in automatically. The state of the agent is set to Not Ready. If the customer
is still on the call, then the agent continues to handle the call but outbound specific options will not be
available on the agent desktop.

Failover Scenarios for Progressive and Predictive IVR-Based Outbound:


• The CTI ports on the master engine will go out of service on a failover and the calls that are in progress
between customers and CTI ports will be disconnected. The standby server will continue dialing out the
remaining contacts in the campaign after the failover.

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Unified CCX Failover
Engine Redundancy

Failover Scenarios for Progressive and Predictive Agent-Based Outbound:


• If an agent is reserved for an outbound campaign and the master engine goes down before the call is
transferred to the agent, then the agent is automatically logged out. The dialed out contacts if any, that
are yet to be connected to the agent are dropped.
• If an agent is currently on an outbound call and the master engine goes down, then the agent is logged
out and is logged back in automatically. The state of the agent is set to Not Ready. If the customer is
still on the call, then the agent continues to handle the call but outbound specific options will not be
available on the agent desktop.
• If an agent is currently on an outbound call and Cisco Finesse service restarts or agent closes the browser,
then the agent is automatically logged in after 60 seconds and the state of the agent is set to Not Ready.
If the customer is still on the call, then the agent continues to handle the call but outbound specific
options will not be available on the agent desktop.

Engine Redundancy
Any incoming call arriving at Unified Communications Manager destined for Unified CCX route points can
be accepted by the Unified CCX engine and all Unified CCX call treatment and ACD routing services are
operational. Automatically logging on large numbers of agents may take up to one minute.
During failover, ACD subsystem will not be able to route calls to agents until the automatic login process
completes and the agent manually sets the state to Ready. Agents on Unified CCX routed calls will see those
calls survive and Finesse will automatically re login agents back within one minute. After being logged back
in, agents will have to set the state to Ready when they are ready to begin receiving calls.

When WAN Link Between Data Centers is Down—Island Mode


Connectivity failure creates a scenario called ‘Island mode’ where each node (on either side of the network)
assumes mastership and handles calls. Each node behaves as if the other side has failed and declares itself
master (Engine and Data Stores components). The node that was already the master, continues as is. Phones
and Finesse need to register with Unified CM and server on the same side of the network. This operation
happens automatically. The following lists the failover behaviors:
• Historical data is written to local Data Stores
• Real Time Reporting (RTR) shows the status of each node independently
• No configuration changes are allowed
• Enterprise Database access across the network is not be possible
• Outbound will be impaired as these do not support high availability

If the Island mode occurs for more than four days, DB replication between the nodes will be broken and will
need to be reestablished from Unified CCX Administration web interface when the WAN link is restored.
Backup scripts are executed on the publisher, and it backs up the database that has mastership. In Island mode,
only one node gets backed up and the data getting collected on the other node does not get backed up. The
backup is inconsistent, and if restored, there will be loss of data.

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Unified CCX Failover
When the Master Engine is Down

When Connectivity is Restored


Once the network connectivity is restored, convergence of engine mastership occurs. Two masters cannot
exist and one of the nodes will drop mastership. All active calls being handled by that node will be dropped
and agents logged on to that node will be logged out.
Similarly, convergence happens for the data stores with no disruption in call activity. All data will be replicated
as soon as convergence is done only if the link was up within a predetermined replication retention period,
otherwise, the customer needs to initialize the replication from datastore control center pages.

Tip You can use the Unified CCX Administration Datastore control center pages or the CLI to check the
replication status.

When the Master Engine is Down


Once the master engine (on Node 1) goes down, CVD elects the engine on node 2 as master. Calls which
were being handled by the engine on node 1 when it failed are dropped, and all active calls are dropped. New
calls coming in while agents are re-logging in with the master engine on node 2 stay in the queue until agents
log in. Historical data will be written to the node 2 master engine’s local database.

When WAN Link and One of the Engines is Down


When the WAN goes down, CTI functionality, which was provided by Unified CM Sub 1 across the WAN
is no longer available. The master engine on node 2 fails over to Unified Communications Manager Sub 2.
All calls still in the queue are dropped. Agents do not need to re-login.
Some agents will remain in not-ready state since the corresponding agent’s phones are registered with the
Unified Communications Manager Sub 1. There is no automatic function to force phones to re-register.
This situation is corrected when the WAN comes back up again.

Unified CCX Failover


The following table describes the persistent connection call behavior during the failover of Unified CCX and
Cisco Unified Communications Manager:

Failover Cisco Finesse


Persistent Connection Call ICD Call
Unified CCX failover Not terminated Not terminated
Cisco Unified Communications Manager Terminated Not terminated. The agent
failover enters the Not Ready state
Desktop connectivity loss Not terminated Not terminated

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Unified CCX Failover
Cisco Finesse Failover

Cisco Finesse Failover


This section describes Cisco Finesse operations during the failover of Unified CCX.

Smart Failover
Cisco Finesse clients do not complete redirection to the other server unless they confirm that Cisco Finesse
is IN_SERVICE on the other server. If the failed side recovers by that time, the clients automatically reconnect
to it.

Failure Scenarios in HA Deployment


This table describes failure scenarios that you might encounter in high availability deployment.

Failure Failover What What What Cisco Finesse Recovery


scenario happens to happens to happens to client
Unified CCX? Cisco Finesse Cisco Finesse behavior
Site A? Site B?
Connectivity No Both Site A IN_SERVICE IN_SERVICE Clients can After the
between Site and Site B connect and connectivity
A and Site B become operate with is
is broken master. both sites. reestablished,
(Island Unified CCX
mode). converges on
the primary
node as
master.
Clients
connected to
nonmaster
node are
redirected.

Active node Yes Site B will be OUT_OF_SERVICE IN_SERVICE Clients can After the
is down (Site the master. connect and connectivity
A). operate with is
Site B. reestablished,
the primary
node will be
the master.
Clients
connected to
Site B node
are redirected
to Site A.

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Unified CCX Failover
Finesse IP Phone Agent Failure Behavior

Finesse IP Phone Agent Failure Behavior


Unlike the Finesse desktop, the Finesse IP Phone Agent does not automatically failover to the alternate Finesse
server. To ensure continued operations in a failure situation, you must configure at least two Finesse IP Phone
services in Unified CM, each pointing to different Finesse servers.
When the Finesse server fails, Finesse IPPA attempts to reconnect to it every 5 seconds. After three attempts,
if the Finesse server is not in service, Finesse IPPA displays a server unavailable message to the agent. The
total time to go out of service is approximately 15 seconds.
In a failure scenario, the Finesse IPPA agents must exit from the current Finesse service and manually sign
in to another configured Finesse service that points to an alternate Finesse server. After they successfully sign
in to an alternate Finesse service, the agents can resume normal operations.

Cisco Unified Intelligence Center


Server is Down
In a two-node high availability (HA) setup, you can connect to any node to access reports. If the node you
are connected to goes down, then log in to the other node to access reports.

Island Mode
If WAN is down, the nodes function in Island mode and both of the nodes independently assume mastership
(engine and data stores components). You can access reports from either of the nodes.

Note There will be a data discrepancy in the reports as there is no data replication between the nodes till the
connectivity is restored.

Standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center


Unified CCX 11.0(1) provides support for a standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center system in addition
to the on-box Cisco Unified Intelligence Center.
A standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center is available with Premium Cisco Unified Intelligence Center
licenses. The version of the standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center should be the same as the Unified
Intelligence Center that is embedded in Unified CCX. The Standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center
supports multiple data sources including Unified CCX.
In a Unified CCX High Availability deployment, the standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center should be
connected to the standby node on Unified CCX to minimize the load on the master node. In case of failover
of Unified CCX the Cisco Unified Intelligence Center connects to the new standby node. Unified CCX does
not support the High Availability of the standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center.
To install standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, see the Installation and Upgrade Guide for Cisco
Unified Intelligence Center, located at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9755/prod_installation_
guides_list.html.

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Unified CCX Failover
Web Chat

For more information on how to create custom reports, see the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Report
Developer Guide, located at: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_user_
guide_list.html.

Note Live Data is not supported on the standalone Cisco Unified Intelligence Center.

Web Chat
With high availability, failure of the active server can be detected and the nonvoice subsystem automatically
fails over from the active server to the standby server. All unanswered chats are moved to the new active
server.
All logged-in agents are logged out and redirected to the new active server, where they need to log in again.
An active chat session is terminated in the Finesse agent desktop. The agent must log in to the new active
server.
The fault tolerance for Web Chat is provided in the Unified CCX. In an HA deployment, SocialMiner is
configured to communicate with both the Unified CCX nodes. When a new contact arrives at SocialMiner,
both the Unified CCX nodes are notified.
In the case of a failover, all queued or unread contacts are reintroduced by SocialMiner into Unified CCX,
and the new master server will queue these contacts and start the allocation.

Attention Cisco SocialMiner does not support HA deployment options. Chat will not be available if SocialMiner is
down.

Note Web Chat does not support the Island mode scenario.

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Unified CCX Failover
Web Chat

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APPENDIX B
References
• References, page 113

References
The following table lists important links related to Unified CCX:
Category Documents
Solution Design Software and Hardware Compatibility Guide for Cisco Unified CCX and Cisco
Unified IP IVR
http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Compatibility_Matrix_for_Unified_CCX

Sample Scripts Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Script Repository


http://www.cisco.com/en/us/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_implementation_
design_guides_list.html.

Install and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Installation and Upgrade Guide
upgrade
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/prod_installation_guides_
list.html
Virtualization for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express
http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Virtualization_for_Cisco_Unified_Contact_Center_Express

Configure Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Administration Guide


http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_installation_and_
configuration_guides_list.html

Administer and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Operations Guide


maintain
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_installation_and_
configuration_guides_list.html

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References
References

Category Documents
Troubleshoot Troubleshooting Unified Contact Center Express
http://docwiki.cisco.com/wiki/Troubleshooting_Unified_Contact_Center_Express

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