Cisco Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 9.0(2) Design Guide

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Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 SRND
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Chapter 7      Cisco Unified Expert Advisor Option
Characteristics
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The administrator can also limit the amount of time a call remains unanswered with Unified Expert 
Advisor before being returned to Unified ICM. Unified CVP's ring-no-answer (RNA) time-out 
feature on outbound SIP calls can be set so that any call to Unified Expert Advisor must be answered 
within a certain number of seconds; any call not answered within the specified time is withdrawn by 
Unified CVP and causes a re-query into the Unified ICM routing script, with a re-query code 
indicating ring-no-answer. Note that, in Unified CVP 4.1, this time-out can be set only on a global 
basis; it cannot be set differently for Unified Expert Advisor destinations than for other destinations.
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Various features allow the administrator to increase the likelihood that an expert will accept the call. 
For example, the broadcast number in an assignment queue definition could be increased, so that 
more experts will be offered the task at one time, thus increasing the likelihood that one will accept 
during the first round of offers. Also, expert advisors may be configured on an individual basis to 
not be allowed to reject tasks. Such advisors do not receive the offer message at all; they only receive 
the call. As a business practice, it might be appropriate for certain users to be configured in this way 
as a last resort, so that somebody's phone always rings.
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Although the following technique actually takes effect before the call reaches Unified Expert 
Advisor, it is relevant to this discussion. Unified Expert Advisor offers a feature whereby even 
expert advisors whose IM clients are set to Not Available can be offered tasks. In other words, such 
expert advisors are not allowed to make themselves unavailable for tasks. This setting can be 
configured on a per-AQ basis. As a result, the administrator could create two parallel AQs with 
identical membership rules but different settings for this flag. Then, the administrator could 
configure escalating queues in the Unified ICM script editor so that, if the normal queue contains 
no available agents, after a certain amount of time the special queue gets added to the list. This 
method effectively allows expert advisors to be considered for the call if they are logged in to their 
IM clients but not "present."
Attributes
Attributes are user-configurable variables that can be associated with incoming calls as well as with 
individual expert advisors. When associated with incoming calls, their values can be populated from 
Unified ICM call variables or Extended Call Context (ECC) variables, or from arbitrary SIP header 
variables that might have been provided by a SIP endpoint that represents the caller. Additional standard 
call contact information such as ANI, DNIS, GUID, and so forth, is also stored by default in their 
respective system-defined attributes, and the entire set of call-related attributes makes up the 
ContactDetail. ContactDetail is the basis for the call detail record that is stored in both the reporting 
server and the Unified ICM historical database for each call.
When associated with expert advisors, attributes can be used to help qualify or disqualify individual 
advisors from various assignment queues. For example, an expert advisor attribute called YearsInJob 
with a value of 2 might disqualify the advisor from an assignment queue whose configuration calls for 
advisors with at least 5 years of experience.
When it comes time to select the best expert advisors to handle a particular contact, attributes come into 
play for assignment queues whose selection strategy is spatial. Unified Expert Advisor has the ability to 
compare like (numeric) attributes that are associated with the expert advisor and with the incoming call, 
and to place advisors in priority order according to closest match among many values. This is sometimes 
known as N-Dimensional Routing.
Attributes are also displayed in an expert advisor's presence client window as tasks are offered or 
assigned. This allows the presence client to act as a sort of lightweight CTI desktop, as described in the 
section on