A large university recently reached out to Peak Insight. They were facing some challenges within their Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express (UCCX) contact centre, and were frustrated.
“Our Cisco UCCX IVR scripting is officially out of control. It has evolved over time, being added-to, tweaked and quick-fixed by various staff members. It’s undocumented, uncommented, and is a wide-ranging mix of sub-scripts and XML files to provide the functionality the university needs. What’s even more challenging is that changes need to be made quickly throughout the year – for exams, holiday periods and during unforeseen circumstances such as COVID-19. Making any change is now high risk, difficult to test and we have already had a number of outages due to human error.”
The main challenge was managing time of day call routing. It was implemented via a number of XML files to cover the holiday periods and operating hours behaviour for more than fifteen (15) different departments. A department would raise a request for a change in operating hours and announcements, and IT would scramble to make the high risk changes on time. It was not sustainable.
Peak Insight took the approach to first review and document the existing scripting, to ease the support challenges with the existing environment, and to then prepare a future state that would address the challenges and future requirements of the university.
This approach included:
- Consulting with stakeholders from each university department to understand their current requirements, challenges, the future opportunities
- Remotely obtaining the existing UCCX scripting and configuration. This included reviewing time of day / day of week call routing, emergency and special announcements and all call variables and prompts in use.
- Identifying that the Cisco UCCX 12.x Advanced Supervisor capabilities would best meet the time of day (and other) requirements
- Upgrading Cisco UCCX from 10.6 to 12.5 in a low risk, parallel approach
- Re-designing and deploying the UCCX configuration to best practice standards, and to take advantage of Cisco UCCX 12.x features. This included:
- Peak Insight developers optimising and fully commenting Cisco UCCX scripting code
- Deploying and integrating the Cisco UCCX 12 Advanced Supervisor ‘Calendar Management’ capability, enabling independent calendars for each department that can be managed immediately without IT involvement, and at low risk
- Deploying and integrating the Cisco UCCX 12 Advanced Supervisor ‘Prompt Management’ capability, enabling departments to self-manage prompts for unforeseen circumstances such as COVID-19 or other operational changes
- Training and adoption activities with each university department to take advantage of the new capabilities
- Training IT support staff
- Performing a no-impact cutover, and handing over to the University IT team for ongoing support.
The feedback received has been very positive across key university departments, including one comment that Peak Insight ‘Nailed the brief.’.
Authorised staff within each department can now self-administer time of day routing, prompts and dynamically add/remove agents from queues during high demand periods without involving IT.
IT can now breathe easy, with documented call flows, simplified and commented UCCX scripting, no involvement in department operational changes and minimal risk for more advanced changes if required in future.
The beauty of this project was that the work was all performed remotely, with the client being interstate, and during the challenges of COVID-19.
Are you facing challenges with complexity in your Cisco UCCX environment?
Is your investment in Cisco UCCX being fully realised?
Would you like to improve your Cisco UCCX reporting, both historical and real-time?
Is your Cisco UCCX platform supporting your remote workforce?
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