Introduction

CISconn delivers real-time connectivity between Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and SAP R/3 (ECC) or mySAP™ CRM using a pre-packaged, server-based Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) approach.

By implementing CISconn a company can achieve significant productivity gains and improvements in quality of service. CISconn enables agents to use SAP as their single user interface, improves call management including caller identification, call routing on business data, screen pre-population, agent status management and much more.

CISconn is a must have solution for companies to realize all the benefits and achieve maximum ROI on their mySAP™ CRM and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express implementations.

Systems connected

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCC) Express Edition, an integral component of the Cisco Unified IP Communications system, offers an integrated full-featured solution for managing customer voice contacts with all the benefits of the converged Cisco IP Telephony architecture.
UCC Express is a single-server, integrated contact-center-in-a-box solution that provides the following features: independence in agent location, improves agent scalability, and provides powerful Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) features, such as conditional routing, call-in-queue and expected-wait-time messages, enterprise data displays, real-time data, and historical reporting together with integrated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services.

mySAP™ SAP CRM

The mySAP™ Customer Relationship Management (mySAP™ CRM) solution provides agents with the tools they need to seamlessly handle inbound and outbound service, sales, marketing, or IT transactions via phone, e-mail, fax, and the Web, all on a single business platform that unites the front and back office processes. mySAP™ CRM also provides managers with portal-based access to all SAP or third-party administration, maintenance, and reporting tools. The result is an efficient interaction center that optimizes staffing levels, measures agent performance, benchmarks operational systems, and ensures that customer acquisition and retention goals are aligned with corporate cost and revenue objectives without requiring an expensive staff of programmers.

Benefits

Customer satisfaction

Callers will be identified as soon as a call is received. All data captured through the IVR interaction will be available to the agent in the SAP Customer Interaction Center (CIC) via a SAPphone™ pop-up. Agents can also make calls from SAP using click-to-dial, that is, they can call any entry in the customer database by a click of the mouse without having to dial a telephone number manually. All of this is about reducing customer wait time and providing faster service.

Increased productivity

The workflows are fully automated, there is no need to re-enter information on the agent's desktop. When a call is transfered, CISconn ensures that SAP data is carried over to the other agent as well. CISconn seamlessly integrates Cisco UCC Express with mySAP™ CRM, utilizing complete CTI functionality for even more effective customer relationship management.

A single unified user interface

Additional client applications (e.g. Cisco UCC Express Agent Desktop) are no longer needed to access the IP phone functions. Agents use the enhanced mySAP™ CRM desktop application only – both CRM components and call controls are provided in one seamless interface.

Architecture

CISconn is a middleware solution with three main components: the CISconn Communication Server running on dedicated hardware that resides between UCC Express and mySAP™ CRM, the CISconn UCC Express Module, and the CISconn mySAP CRM Module residing on their respective servers.

From SAP the CISconn Server behaves like a standard SAPphone™ interface and communicates with the SAP CIC module via RFC protocol.
On the UCC Express server side CISconn uses custom Java classes to communicate with the CISconn Server utilizing XML-RPC and JTAPI – through Cisco Unified Communications Manager – for call control. Information from UCC Express, like agent state changes or custom data queries is passed in real-time to the CISconn Server and then to the SAP application.

Flexible configuration allows low-cost HW implementation for non-production environments – e.g. many CISconn Servers can run on one platform communicating to one UCC Express system on one end, and be connected to their individual SAP instances on the other end.
More than 120 concurrent calls can be handled by either logically clustering agents with dedicated CISconn Server for each cluster or with SAP server sizing and load balancing.

Features

The CISconn system provides the following features:

• Enables full CTI functionality from within the SAP desktop application – call control capabilities including: dial, answer, drop, hold, resume, transfer and conference.
• Allows UCC Express login/logout and agent status management (ready/not ready) from the SAP desktop.
• Allows SAP data access from IVR scripts (e.g. user identification and authentication based on customer master data).
• Pops up SAP window when incoming call arrives.
• Pops up SAP window at IVR events, with IVR data.
• Transfers captured IVR data to SAP.
• Carries SAP data during Call Transfer (data attached to the original call is attached automatically to the new transferred call).
• Passes call details (including Call Center data) to SAP for further processing (e.g. recorded voice record ID in SAP CRM activities, call durations per tasks etc.).
• Handles outbound calls initiated from SAP.
• Sends out SNMP based alerts upon detecting any communication interruption between the systems. If a high availability UCC Express or SAP server is used, CISconn will switch the communication over, otherwise CISconn will reconnect as soon as the other servers become available.
• Provides easy to use administration utility.