Best Features of Cisco Contact Center Express

If your business uses a call center to receive and answer customer requests, a management application can help organize your customer service center. 

Cisco Contact Center Express

Cisco offers many options for applications you can use with its collaboration platform, such as Cisco BE6K, to empower your small- or medium-sized business communications.

Cisco’s offering when it comes to a management tool is Contact Center Express. This application goes a step further than a call hunt group, which determines how calls are assigned to customer service representatives and collect data on calls. 

At the KR Group, three of our collaboration team’s favorite components of Contact Center Express are: 

  1. Cisco Finesse
  2. Supervisor tools
  3. Data reporting

These components don’t cover everything Contact Center Express can do, but they are three features that make this call center management application stand out as a solid option for call centers.

Cisco Finesse

One of the tools accompanying Contact Center Express is Cisco Finesse. This is a web-based interface for your contact center employees to use. 

It allows your customer service representatives to display and communicate when they’re ready to take calls, as well as other statuses – not ready (with a reason code) and talking. 

What does this mean for your business? 

From an internal perspective, your users and supervisors can benefit from Cisco Finesse and how it allows them to interact with your customers and each other. 

User Perspective

For users of Cisco Finesse, the interface allows them to accurately and efficiently display when they are available to take incoming calls. 

The states available to users are:

Ready:

This state means a customer service representative is able to make outgoing calls and is queued to receive calls. 

Not ready:

A customer service representative can mark themselves as not ready if they’re on a break, following up on their last call, or at the end of their shift. 

Talking:

As this state’s name implies, talking refers to when a user is on the phone with a call.

All of these states help your business by clearly communicating with other customer service representatives within your call center who is doing what.

Supervisor perspective

Contact Center Express

From your call center supervisor’s perspective, Cisco Finesse provides information on the number of calls in queue and how long they’ve been queued. 

Administrators can configure which hunt group algorithm the call center uses to connect callers with customer service representatives. (They also have the ability to configure settings to allow customer service representatives to view those queue details.)

Supervisors can review the queue information through the data Cisco Finesse tracks, but we’ll talk more about tracking and data reporting later in this article. 

What does this mean for your customers?

While your customers are unlikely to ever see the Cisco Finesse interface, they will unknowingly benefit from the organization the interface provides the contact center. 

Even if customers are calling with a complaint, having their call directed to an available agent (thanks to the statuses) in a timely matter (thanks to the queue configuration), means they won’t have any more fuel to add to their fire. 

Supervisor Tools

Beyond Cisco Finesse, Contact Center Express allows many more tools for supervisors within your call center. 

Using Contact Center Express, supervisors are able to:

  • Monitor critical performance metrics 
  • Manage queues, business hours, prompts, and outbound campaigns 
  • View active call details of an agent call in progress
  • Silently monitor inbound and outbound calls
  • Interrupt an agent’s call to interact and assist
  • Change an agent’s state from their desktop in case the agent forgets 
  • Replay recorded conversations 
  • Chat with individual members or the entire team

The tools with Contact Center Express are meant to enable your call center supervisor to lead a positive customer service experience for your employees and customers.

What does this mean for your business?

Supervisor tools give you control and provide insight into your call center. 

By being aware of how Contact Center Express is operating internally and externally and having the ability to configure the application, your call center supervisor can lead a smooth call center.

What does this mean for customers?

The capabilities for the supervisor when it comes to monitoring and stepping in, if necessary, Contact Center Express should provide a layer of assurance for customers since there is a quick way to escalate IT requests. 

Ideally, your customers will never realize your supervisors have all these abilities, but if a situation arises where it’s necessary, Cisco’s goal is to provide a way for supervisors to seamlessly offer assistance.

Data reporting

Cisco Contact Center Express’s capabilities for data reporting is the biggest argument to make for purchasing Contact Center Express. 

Not only are your agents able to connect with your customers, but Contact Center Express also grants you some insight into how they’re connecting. 

What does this mean for your business?

Internally, Contact Center Express allows you to track your agents. The supervisor can review each user’s time spent in different status states to monitor for productivity or potential problems.

The supervisor can even schedule these reports to automatically run and continually monitor the productivity of your agents. 

This element of transparency allows your contact center department to have data to back internal strides toward improvement. 

What does this mean for your customers?

Cisco Contact Center ExpressA lot of the data tracking and reporting is designed to help you strive for the best contact center experience for your customers.

That alone benefits customers, even if they don’t realize it. 

However, Contact Center Express’s data reporting goes even further to enhance the customer experience. 

Customer satisfaction is closely tied to how quickly they can get to the agent who can give them the information they’re looking for. 

When it comes to call centers, satisfying your customers means not having to press multiple numbers to be directed to the line they ultimately need. 

Contact Center Express’s data tracking provides insight on what options your customers used to get to the line they needed. This information allows you to reconfigure to streamline the process based on any patterns you see. 

Do you need Contact Center Express?

The whole point of a call center is so your customers can reach you and get the answer to their question. 

Through Cisco Finesse, supervisor tools, and data improvement tools, Contact Center Express provides an efficient system for your users and customers. It also allows you to continue to improve your call center internally and externally. 

Contact Center Express’s capabilities don’t stop there. To see what Contact Center Express looks like in action, download this free infographic.

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