Cisco Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise 9.0(1)

The following section provides an overview of the Cisco Unified Contact Center (Unified CC) 
Architecture.

 

The Unified CCE delivers intelligent contact routing, call treatment, network-to-desktop computer 
telephony integration (CTI), and multichannel contact management over an IP infrastructure. It 
combines multi-channel automatic call distributor (ACD) functionality with IP telephony in a unified 
solution, enabling customers to rapidly deploy a distributed contact center infrastructure.  

Unified Contact Center provides the following services: 

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Segmentation of customers and monitoring of resource availability  

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Delivery of each contact to the most appropriate resource anywhere in the enterprise  

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Comprehensive customer profiles using contact-related data, such as dialed number and 
calling line ID  

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Routing to the most appropriate resource to meet customer needs based on real-time 
conditions (such as agent skills, availability, and queue lengths) continuously gathered from 
various contact center components  

The Unified Contact Center enables customers to smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice 
applications with Internet applications such as real-time chat, web collaboration, and email. This 
integration enables a single agent to support multiple interactions simultaneously regardless of which 
communications channel the customer chooses. 

The Unified Contact Center is a distributed solution with no single-server implementation, but rather, 
the Unified CCE employs multiple servers each with multiple software components. Deployment 
options are extremely flexible with performance, capacity, and network topology driving the 
deployment design. 

The Unified Contact Center was derived from the Unified ICME with the primary difference being 
that the Unified Contact Center integrates only with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager 
(Unified CM) IP PBX. All other major components of the Unified Contact Center solution are the 
same as a Unified ICM solution. 

The Unified ICM platform was originally designed to route calls between various nodes in the TDM 
telephone network. It is designed with an emphasis on reliability and flexibility. All processing in 
these components is message based. The processing of each message is determined entirely by the 
content of the message, and the current state of the process. The messages are delivered to these 
components using the Unified ICM Message Delivery Service (MDS). MDS ensures that both 
processes are fed the exact same set of messages in the same order. 

One of the most important concepts to understand about the Unified Contact Center is its redundancy 
strategy. The components that contain centralized state are run in duplex, in that two of these 
components work in lockstep to ensure redundancy and immediate recovery from a (single point of 
failure) fault. 

From a device standpoint, a typical Unified CCE deployment looks as follows: