Cisco Knowledge Share – Proactive call center (part #1)

Yes, I know about wallboard applications that can do it and real big call centers that have dedicated supervisors who will not let a caller to be lost in the queue. But what if you have a small call center without a dedicated supervisor, yet your callers are important enough to not be forgotten. How will you make sure that the longest holding customer is not spending more then 60 seconds in the queue? We are talking Cisco here and the platform is Cisco’s unified call center express (uccx) version 5.02. The way I decided to provide this functionality was by alerting via email if the holding time exceeds a certain threshold. Here is how we did it: First you need to configure the email subsystems; this is an easy step which involves the configuration of two fields, mail (SMTP) server and the default email address (which can be overridden in the script. Here is a sample screen shot: This image was lost when Geocities went down, comment if you need it and I’ll try to reproduce That configuration might not work with some mail servers, since not every server support SMTP and there might be firewalls and other things involved. Therefore you should first verify that this is a working configuration by simulating an SMTP session from your uccx server. This is basically done by opening a telnet session to port 25 on the mail server and typing a series of SMTP commands, which are text based. A detailed procedure can be found by running a Google search for the key words ‘telnet SMTP’. A link to a document in TechNet which covers it is: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123686.aspx Once that was done, the script will have to be modified to do the following:

• Measure the time that people hold for an available call center rep.
• Compare the longest holding time to the predefined threshold and either continue as usual or send an email (if the threshold has been exceeded).
• If the threshold has been reached, send an email to the person in charge and alert him about the long holding times.

In the next parts I’ll describe how those three steps were implemented in the script.