Cisco Cisco IPCC Web Option Design Guide

A Unified Expert Advisor skill group may contain only expert advisors; you cannot mix other Unified 
ICM agents with expert advisors in the same skill group. Nevertheless, from Unified ICM's perspective, 
a skill group containing expert advisors is no different than one containing traditional agents. A single 
Queue to Skill Group node may include both traditional and expert advisor skill groups if so desired.

The expert advisor's availability state is determined by the state of his presence client. If the advisor’s 
presence client is not logged in to Cisco Unified Presence, then he is not logged in to any assignment 
queue and therefore not logged in to any Unified ICM skill group. If the advisor’s presence client is 
logged in and available, then the expert is available on all assignment queues (and therefore Unified ICM 
skill groups) of which he is a member. If advisor’s presence client is logged in but "away," then the expert 
is not available in any assignment queues or Unified ICM skill groups.

The Cisco Unified Personal Communicator client, like other IM clients, allows the user to modify the 
list of the presence states that appear in his drop-down list. Similarly, Unified Expert Advisor allows 
administrators to manually define how those presence states map to assignment queue and Unified ICM 
skill group availability status.

From the perspective of Unified ICM, Unified Expert Advisor is just another Enterprise Routing Service 
(ERS) peripheral. Just as with Unified CCE Child and any traditional third-party ACD, the Unified ICM 
router selects a hypothetical agent from a skill group but then routes the call to the peripheral, not to the 
agent. It is then up to the peripheral to indicate to Unified ICM which agent actually received the call.

Also as with Unified CCE Child and third-party ACDs, it can take some time for the agent to receive the 
call, during which time the peripheral is responsible for any local queuing that might be required. On the 
other hand, Unified ICM should be scripted so that it does not to send the call until it is reasonably sure 
there is an agent available to accept it. In the case of Unified Expert Advisor, the local queue time could 
be considerable because it includes not only the time in which expert advisors are being offered the task, 
but also the possibility that no advisor accepts it. In that case the call continues under the control of 
Unified Expert Advisor until more expert advisors in the assignment queue become available.

The next section on 

, explains ways to mitigate 

the effects of this queue time.

As mentioned above, due to Unified Expert Advisor's process for offering tasks to advisors, a call could 
remain under the control of Unified Expert Advisor without being answered for quite some time after it 
has finished queuing. During that time, the caller is listening to ring tone. You can use any of the 
following methods to mitigate the impact on the caller experience:

If Unified CVP 7.0 or later is used as the routing service and queuing platform, then Unified CVP 
can be configured to provide a special ring tone for calls while they are at Unified Expert Advisor. 
The ring tone can be any .wav file, such as a music file, and it can be applied on the basis of a 
particular outbound dialed number, which in this case would be the translation route address pattern 
that is used to transfer calls to Unified Expert Advisor from Unified CVP. For more information, 
refer to the custom ringtone patterns feature in the Unified CVP documentation.