Since Cisco Unified Attendant Console has reached its end of life, clients are offered several alternatives from Cisco Solution Partners. This article will help you to make the rights choice.
Directory and Basic Call Control Features
If a Cisco IP phone is one of your main business tools you need the most convenient interface to:
- quickly find any person and call him,
- see who’s calling you,
- perform the basic call control actions – call forward, conference, parking etc.
So, when selecting the attendant console for Cisco UCM pay attention directory and call control features. Make sure that the solution supports:
- several directories – employees, clients, personal contacts etc,
- customizable structure for each directory – for example, first/last name and position for employee, company name and city for clients and so on,
- presence status for internal contacts,
- convenient search and filter tools,
- easy to use call control features – put the call on hold, forward the call (blind and consultative), organize an ad-hoc conference.
Then, depending on who is going to use the console software, pay attention to special features.
- Features for Managers
If the console app is going to be used by sales people or top managers, the key feature is the intuitive user interface which doesn’t require much training. Employees photo, large buttons, drag-and-drop features would be nice. And, of course, the call history panel.
- Features for Assistants
If you need a solution for top manager assistants, pay attention to some special features, like:
- phone lines monitoring – to know who the manager is talking to and who’s calling him,
- call interception – to intercept and answer the incoming call when the manager is away,
- “whisper” feature – to notify manager about important call while he is on the phone,
- conference control features – to create audio-meetings for manager and control the conference even without being its participant.
- Features for Receptionists and Contact Center Agents
Lastly, when it comes to reception or contact center personnel, whose main task is to answer incoming calls, make sure the attendant console provides superior call routing and distribution tools:
- queue support (both UCCX and CUCM native queuing) with the ability to see who’s on queue and choose the call to answer,
- intelligent call routing assistant, which shows a list of employees to whom calls from the current calling party were routed most often,
- hot keys support to process the incoming calls as fast as possible,
- dynamic search, fast enough even when searching tens of thousands of contacts,
- comments to calls, visible for other operators.
The article is provided by Aurus, the official Cisco Solution Partner. Aurus PhoneUP is the application suite for Cisco Unified Communications Manager Enterprise and BE 6000/7000 which includes both Enterprise Directory and Attendant Console for CUCM modules.
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