A New Groove: Cisco Contact Center Release 11.6

When I was a kid, I won a vinyl record album in a local contest. (For those of you too young to remember, record albums were how early humans listened to recorded music in the dark ages before streaming music. Or CDs. Or cassette tapes. Or 8-tracks.)

I dashed to the neighborhood record store to collect my prize–possibly an Elton John album. I eagerly ran home, where to my dismay, I discovered that my dad’s home-built stereo system had blown a tube. I wasn’t about to listen to anything.

Darn it! (I may have used stronger words at the time).

When is a prize not a prize? When you can’t do anything with it. I know I could have used the album as a Frisbee, but hopefully you get my point.

How often do companies release a product or feature that is essentially unusable? Sometimes it won’t work in your environment. Sometimes it’s too difficult to deploy or manage. Or the user experience is cumbersome. (Does anyone remember those horrid mid-song pauses on 8-track tapes?)

That’s why it’s so important that products and features are usable in actual practice. And that’s why I’m so excited about Release 11.6 of Cisco’s contact center product line. With these offerings, organizations of all sizes can provide connected digital experiences for superior contact centers.

In developing this release, our development team worked closely not just with our partners, but a record number of early field trial customers. Throughout, they followed four key principles:

Make it Flexible: Our teams worked to ensure that your business can deploy the solutions in your environment, to meet your business needs.

Make it Usable: Superior usability means that it’s easier and faster for your contact center agents and supervisors to support customers and do their jobs.

Make it Simple: We focused on making the whole process more straightforward, from designing, ordering, and deploying, to managing your contact center solution.

Make it a Great Experience: Focusing not just on our users, but your customers, we emphasized improving your customers’ journeys to make them seamless across time and channels.

This was our philosophy in development. Now here are some examples of what that looks like in our products:

Shared components:

Finesse desktop enhancements to improve agent productivity

Single sign-on enhancements

Context Service serviceability improvements

Real time view of state and call history for agents and supervisors

Reporting refresh for charts and dashboards (see below)

Enhanced security, including TLS 1.2 support

Contact Center Enterprise solution line:

Enhanced outbound campaign management with no single point of failure

Enterprise chat and email now enabled for integration to third-party tools

Packaged Contact Center Enterprise support for global multi-site deployments and enhanced support for third-party CRM integrations

Remote Expert Mobile enhancements for co-browse and mobile media performance

Contact Center Express solution line:

Enhanced digital channel capabilities, including larger email attachments and group chat

Multichannel agent state and wrap-up reports

New supervisor functionality, including monitoring outbound calls and access to historical reports

Scripting enhancements.

Here’s an example of a new reporting dashboard.

Is your business looking for a contact center  solution? If you already have one, do you feel like you’re stuck in a groove and not able to get the most from it? Are you worried about continued support for your present contact center?

If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, I encourage you to consider what we have to offer. With Release 11.6, there’s never been a better time to go with something that will work for you–and your customers!