The common struggle that Call Center Managers and Supervisors have with reporting in Cisco’s CUIC (Cisco Unified Intelligence Center) are predominantly centered around trying to understand which reports they should run when they have so many to choose from, trying to understand each of the reports, and then in trying to compare certain reports. There can be several reasons people struggle in understanding how to read and or pull reports, but there is a simple solution to reporting more effectively. That solution is to understand the UCCX Architecture as it pertains to your environment and then to understand how your calls are scripted. To best understand this, it’s important to start with the basics.
Unified Contact Center Express, or UCCX, is the communications platform that many Call Centers around the world use to direct a call that is dialed by a customer to a main line number and to be distributed to Call Center Agents based on real time availability and skill levels. It supports what is called Skills Based Routing. UCCX allows for a customized environment which can lead to report confusion because the architecture drives the reporting. This is all important to our topic because UCCX gives us CUIC.
Cisco Unified Intelligence Center is a web-based application that serves each UCCX customer as an information portal. It provides real time as well as historical data, dashboards for at a glance views, stock report views that are tailored to present relevant and user-friendly data that is geared toward the contact center management demographics. Other features available via CUIC is the ability to edit stock reports to create individual views, the ability to share those reports, schedule reports to run and be delivered via Email, and of course the ability to export.
Below you see a clip of an example UCCX Architecture. This shows the different levels of reporting we have based on the way the UCCX was build. For example, at the top, we have System Level Reporting. This is ALL calls that go into the UCCX footprint. If you have multiple departments, System Level Reporting would show you statistics as they pertain to ALL departments.
Below the System Level, you have the Application Level Reporting. This would be an example of some calls going to a Sales application and some going to a Support application. It’s important to know that an application is what determines which script we use when a customer dials a specific number. A script is a form of coding language that Cisco uses to determine the path of a customer call, after the caller dials the 1-800 # and the time it is presented to an Agent. This includes but it is not limited to, playing an IVR menu, presenting a message to a caller when you have high volume, playing position in queue, and eventually sending the call the Agent extension. So, when we report at the Application level, we are looking at the number of calls that are presented to that Application. Not the CSQ. What this means, is that we can see how many calls presented and abandoned at the Sales level, but these reports won’t show how many calls abandoned in each sales queue, because it’s possible for a caller to abandon a call before the script places a call in a queue to be answered by an Agent. This would be someone who called in and got as far as hearing a menu you play for them, but maybe they didn’t choose a selection, or perhaps they made an incorrect option. It is also possible for calls to start in one Application, but the script will redirect the caller to another Application. It’s for this reason that it’s important to know what your environment is configured to do before looking to compare reporting.
Below Application Level Reporting, we have CSQ or Contact Service Queue Level Reporting. These are calls that are presented to the Application and are then routed to a CSQ. When looking at CSQ based reports it is again important to understand your environment and what your routing call flow is because you can have calls that are queued in one CSQ and are then nested in a secondary CSQ. That would affect the data you have represented in your CSQ based reports. AN example of that happening would be if no agents are available in one CSQ, so the system sends the call to look to a backup CSQ.
Lastly, we have Agent Based Reporting. This would look specifically at calls presented at the Agent and Team level. Just like the other levels of reporting its important to be cautious when comparing reporting because you can have 10 calls presented to two Agents, (5 to Agent A and 5 to Agent B) but at the CSQ level there are only 9 calls presented. Looking into how this is possible, if Agent A is presented 5 calls but only handles 4, that 5th call is going to ring to the next available agent. In this case Agent B.
So, to know which report you’re looking to run, first ask, what it is that you want to see. Do you have specific KPI goals you’re looking for, and are they for the entire department? Are they at the individual CSQ level, or are you looking for information on your Team’s Performance? The answer to those questions will point you either to System/Application level reporting (depending on your environment) or to CSQ based Reports, or to Agent based reports. While looking at CUIC, under Reports > Stock > Unified CCX Historical > Inbound, you will see the report titles will drive the difference between CSQ and Agent level reports. But if there is still confusion you can always consult the help icon in the report itself once it’s been run. This will show you the report definition and spell out the purpose and goal of each report.
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