Gain Visibility into the Performance of Your Cisco Contact Center Environment (CCE)

Too many contact centers are working without the insights and information needed to quickly and effectively resolve customer issues, resulting in poor customer experiences and employee frustration. The integration of AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM) into Cisco Contact Center Enterprise — including Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) and Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (PCCE) — provides contact centers the visibility required to radically improve customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and more.

The Role of the Contact Center

With rising consumer expectations, increasingly complex omnichannel journeys, distributed remote workforces, and geographically dispersed call centers, organizations need to elevate their game to foster customer loyalty, enhance digital experiences, and improve employee engagement. The contact center plays a pivotal role in their success. Traditional monitoring approaches no longer suffice; more robust tools are required. 

Today's customers contacting the call center expect agents to have all their pertinent data and the information necessary to solve issues in real-time and on the first interaction.  Modern contact centers serve as the keystone for managing customer interactions across a variety of channels, integrating call handling software, chatbots, databases, CRM systems, workforce scheduling software, office productivity suites and other applications essential to delivering high quality customer experience.  When these applications are slow, unavailable, or don't have the necessary data, it impacts an agent's ability to meet customer expectations, negatively impacting the brand and the bottom line.

Challenges in the Current Landscape

Traditional approaches to measuring contact center health focus simply on reporting the number of incoming calls and available agents.  They neglect vital insights such as system performance, caller demographics, or call distribution. Additionally, many contact center administrators are confined to the limited visibility of operational silos and lack a comprehensive perspective of the entire system.  As a consequence, they are left to make educated guesses about their operating environment and struggle to understand the upstream dependencies or downstream impact of poor component performance. 

Without such crucial data, administrators' ability to proactively identify and address issues that block effective and timely resolution of customer issues is severely handicapped.  Instead, they must often rely solely on agent reports to become aware of problems.  This can lead to a build-up of agent frustration, as they find themselves ill-equipped to resolve customer issues effectively.  Unaddressed, such situations can degrade employee engagement, and potentially increase agent turnover. This point is of particular concern in the context of the ongoing talent shortage.

Connecting CX and EX

It is crucial for organizations to understand the deep interconnection between CX and EX while recognizing the importance to develop both simultaneously. WWT's 2023 research report on digital workspace identified equalizing EX and CX as a top priority for organizations. To address challenges with disparate systems, multiple vendors, and siloed reporting, organizations are turning to  Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) solutions to unify data and turn it into actionable insights.

Addressing the Challenges with Cisco AppDynamics APM

The integration of Cisco AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring (APM) into Cisco Contact Center Enterprise [CCE] provides contact centers with the visibility they need to radically improve digital experience and more. With this first major "observability" integration within CCE, for Cisco AppDynamics, it allows organizations to observe and measure discrete performance between call flows. Measuring the gaps between calls speed across each flow component allows administrators to pinpoint and fix issues, resulting in faster resolution times, less downtime, and improved system performance.

The solution provides a non-intrusive way to gain visibility into the performance of complex contact center environments. It is also extremely easy to get up and running. More recent versions of CCE already have the AppDynamics APM solution agent embedded in the contact center software, so there's no heavy lift or deployment; you simply need to turn on the service. 

Cisco AppDynamics provides visibility into other contact center related applications as well.  It can deliver a holistic picture of both contact center and other applications critical to delivering a quality customer experience.  As a result, teams are empowered to see how a CCE environment connects to external applications and third party service providers, quickly identifying where problems might occur.

Benefits of Cisco AppDynamics

This solution reduces the time and cost needed to maintain contact center applications. If you're looking for ways to reduce operational costs of your on-prem contact center, leveraging Cisco AppDynamics may be an attractive alternative to the cost and effort involved in moving everything to the cloud. 

This new visibility enables you to move from predicting to forecasting so you can proactively address changes in real-time to serve customers better—for example, by adjusting shifts, scheduling people differently, or moving event times. It offers an attractive option to improving operational stability and efficiency instead of relying on a SaaS provider to operate your environment.

Visibility is especially important for organizations where the quality of customer engagement is paramount and contact centers are mission critical. Prime examples include banks, financial services organizations, and the Veterans Administration (VA) crisis hotline, where lives are literally on the line. When interactions are vital, a lack of visibility in the environment presents a major risk. The integration of Cisco AppDynamics APM into CCE provides a sense of confidence and visibility that is unmatched in the industry. 

Cisco Full Stack Observability (FSO) in Cisco Contact Center Enterprise delivers the ability to see agent and application performance wherever a customer service representative works, without being tied to a physical contact center space. Removing technology limitations to remote work is especially valuable during labor shortages and equips the option of a "follow-the-sun" model to serve customers better.

Why WWT

As AppDynamics' top global partner, WWT can help you integrate the most appropriate fit-for-purpose solutions as part of a holistic strategy to help solve your unique and most pressing challenges so your agents and your business thrive.

You can try out the Cisco AppDynamics solutions in our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), and work with WWT experts in APM and DEM solutions. WWT is the only Cisco partner that can demo this service in an environment that emulates yours so you can experience exactly how it will work for you.

Depending on your version of CCE and the availability of licensing the AppDynamics tool, we can help facilitate discussions for scoping, installation, and configuration of the tool so you can "see" the visual flow of your calls.

We can also help you integrate AppDynamics within the ecosystem of observability / AIOps, as we understand all of the many tool collaborators and how they work together. We can help you develop and support these solutions. 

About the Authors

• Tree Lindemann Operations & Delivery Lead for AIOps, WWT
• Patrick Bond TSA, Contact Center, WWT
• David Milne Sr. Solutions Engineer, Worldwide Channels, Cisco AppDynamics