A report by Contact Center Week, “The Future of the Contact Center: A Forecast,” found that, “Although (businesses) are emphasizing digital to a greater extent than ever before, 89% of companies believe phone communication will still play a role in the contact center of the future.”
Moreover, said the report, “collecting and actioning” (contact center) customer insights will remain an important objective toward increasing automation, improving customer satisfaction, and driving customer loyalty.
Our Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) customers tell us frequently that they have never had a call center data shortage. Instead, they say, their challenge has been putting all this information into an easy-to-use, logical form that will accelerate analysis and informed business decision-making.
Simply put, they want the ability to better utilize contact center data to make their lives easier and be more responsive to business leaders.
The difficulty lies in the inherent deficiencies they find in the native CUIC reporting application. While CUIC does offer some service level achievement and agent or queue metrics, it does not allow contact center and business managers to either identify issue area root causes, or take reasoned, corrective, real-time actions to address these issues.
Making a good reporting platform even better
The CUIC application is designed to assist businesses create, manage, and generate reports for its UCCX platform. And yet, despite Cisco best design efforts, CUIC has significant reporting shortcomings that we hear about often.
The reporting and analytics challenges are varied but have a few common themes. For UCCX customers exploring ways to enhance and extend the visibility and reach of their current reporting application, and from conversations we have had with both ISI customers and prospective customers, we have developed a “short list” of common contact center challenges organizations such as yours face and the ways you can solve them.
Challenges our customers faced (and a solution)
Challenge: “How can I streamline the Cisco native reporting process? Today we use three different apps (CUIC, Finesse, and CAR) to get full, on-demand, historic, and real-time visibility into call activity, call routing, queue metrics, and agent productivity. And while this data comes from only two sources (CUCM and UCCX), all three Cisco apps are needed to provide this visibility which is cumbersome to secure and use.”
Solution: ISI offers a single application that not only gathers data from both sources (CUCM and UCCX) but is significantly more comprehensive than the native Cisco capability and provides greater and more flexible call visibility.
Challenge: “Is there an easy way for my team to create a variety of reports using the native Cisco reporting tool? Right now it appears as if we are limited almost entirely to a roster of pre-set reports because they are drawn from separate data sources.”
Solution: Yes, there is an easy way to do this. ISI provides a more flexible solution that draws from a single data reporting source using a custom report writer. This enhanced functionality gives business managers the ability to make and save a nearly infinite number of custom reports (in addition to a library of included pre-designed reports) quickly and easily. ISI’s all-in-one capability eliminates the need for business managers to ask IT to pull departmental reports or pay expensive professional service fees to outside consultants or vendors to solve the problem.
Challenge: “Is there a reporting solution that can pull data directly from UCCX and create contact center operations reports?”
Solution: Yes. ISI automatically ingests data from UCCX and makes a wide range of customizable reports available without the mechanics of Excel import and manipulation.
Challenge: “How do we perform large database historical trend reporting to optimize resources and operations in response to predictable business fluctuations and other conditions? The CUIC tool greatly limits the size of my database (to roughly 8,000 lines of information).”
Solution: ISI allows Cisco customers to break free of CUIC-imposed limits by providing not only the ability to collect and report on more than a year’s worth of historical data, but by offering more flexible data analysis and summarization functionality as well. In addition, such reports can be run on-demand or scheduled to run during off-peak hours.
Challenge: “We have multiple call center integrations and need to pull data from three separate Cisco databases. This process is extremely time consuming. Is there a way to combine all of this data and display it on a single screen?”
Solution: Numerous customers have come to us with this same issue. The ISI solution supports consolidated reporting, merging each contact center’s information into a single-screen reporting image. Business managers need only log into the ISI platform once to initiate a graphics-based, consolidated report for ready analysis and decision-making.
Challenge: “We use Cisco’s Finesse application but need more real-time call center metric capturing and reporting than it provides via its dashboards and wallboards. Is this something ISI can give us?”
Solution: Yes. ISI offers real-time capabilities that significantly augment those found in Finesse. Our alarm logic, for example, enables contact center managers to set alert thresholds.
When reached, text messages and email notifications are generated and sent to those individuals responsible for tracking and managing call center performance.
Scenarios our customers mention often are instances in which the number of available agents drops too much or the number of calls in queue rises too high. In these cases, designated managers receive notifications and can allocate resources dynamically as needed.
How to increase Cisco reporting visibility
ISI helps hundreds of Unified Cisco Contact Center Express customers handle a myriad of data visibility, reporting, and analytics challenges in addition to the relatively few examples we have outlined here.
We recognize you likely have made significant investments in your organization’s Cisco Contact Center infrastructure. Adding ISI Cloud Analytics to what you already have in place can significantly boost your ability to make better-informed decisions that will delight business managers, better engage your customers, and drive business.
And it all starts with a cup of Starbucks coffee.
Drop an email to coffee@isi-info.com and we’ll send you a Starbucks gift card for simply having a ten-minute conversation with one our Cisco UCCX reporting experts. You’ll be glad you did. (And our knowledgeable data analytics professionals will appreciate the caffeine boost!)
