Systems connected

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCC) Express Edition, an integral component of the Cisco Unified IP Communications system, offers an integrated full-featured solution for managing customer voice contacts with all the benefits of the converged Cisco IP Telephony architecture.

UCC Express is a single-server, integrated contact-center-in-a-box solution that provides the following features: independence in agent location, improves agent scalability, and provides powerful Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) features, such as conditional routing, call-in-queue and expected-wait-time messages, enterprise data displays, real-time data, and historical reporting together with integrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services.

SAP CRM

The SAP CRM Customer Relationship Management solution provides agents with the tools they need to seamlessly handle inbound and outbound service, sales, marketing, or IT transactions via phone, e-mail, fax, and the Web, all on a single business platform that unites the front and back office processes. SAP CRM also provides managers with portal-based access to all SAP or third-party administration, maintenance, and reporting tools. The result is an efficient interaction center that optimizes staffing levels, measures agent performance, benchmarks operational systems, and ensures that customer acquisition and retention goals are aligned with corporate cost and revenue objectives without requiring an expensive staff of programmers.

Benefits

Customer satisfaction

Callers will be identified as soon as a call is received. All data captured through the IVR interaction will be available to the agent in the Interaction Center (IC) of SAP user interface. Agents can also make calls from SAP using click-to-dial, that is, they can call any entry in the customer database by a click of the mouse without having to dial a telephone number manually. All of this is about reducing customer wait time and providing faster service.

Increased productivity

The workflows are fully automated, there is no need to re-enter information on the agent's desktop. When a call is transfered, ccConn ensures that SAP data is carried over to the other agent as well. ccConn seamlessly integrates Cisco UCC Express with SAP CRM, utilizing complete CTI functionality for even more effective customer relationship management.

A single unified user interface

Additional client applications (e.g. Cisco UCC Express Agent Desktop) are no longer needed to access the IP phone functions. Agents use the enhanced SAP CRM WEB user interface only - both CRM components and contact center functions are provided in one seamless interface.

Architecture

ccConn is a middleware solution with two main components: the ccConn Communication Server running on dedicated hardware that resides between UCC Express and SAP CRM and the ccConn UCC Express IVR script Module needed in case of IVR integration.

From SAP the ccConn Server behaves like a standard ICI interface and communicates with the SAP IC module via http or https protocol.
On the UCC Express server side ccConn uses custom Java classes to communicate with the ccConn Server utilizing WebService technology. For call controll ccConn relies on JTAPI, that connects directly to Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Information from UCC Express, like agent state changes or custom data queries is passed in real-time to the ccConn Server and then to the SAP application.

Flexible configuration allows low-cost HW implementation for non-production environments - e.g. many ccConn Servers can run on one platform communicating to one UCC Express system on one end, and be connected to their individual SAP instances on the other end.
Hundreds concurrent calls can be handled by either logically clustering agents with dedicated ccConn Server for each cluster or with SAP server sizing and load balancing.

Features

The ccConn system provides the following features:

• Enables full CTI functionality from within the SAP IC - call control capabilities including: dial, click2dial, answer, drop, hold, resume, transfer, consult, alternate, conference.
• Allows UCC Express login/logout, agent status management (ready/not ready including reason codes and work wrup-up codes) from the SAP IC.
• Allows SAP data access from IVR scripts (e.g. user identification and authentication based on customer master data).
• Automatically loads information about the identified customer when incoming call arrives.
• Shows on SAP IC information comming from the IVR.
• Transfers captured IVR data to SAP.
• Carries SAP data during Call Transfer (data attached to the original call is attached automatically to the new transferred call).
• Passes call details (including Call Center data) to SAP for further processing (e.g. recorded voice record ID in SAP CRM activities, call durations per tasks etc.).
• Handles outbound calls initiated from SAP.
• Sends out alerts upon detecting any communication interruption between the systems.
• If a high availability UCC Express or SAP server is used, ccConn will switch the communication over, otherwise ccConn will reconnect as soon as the other servers become available.
• Provides easy configuration.