Item: Cisco Unified Contact Center
Rating: 8
Author: James Riley

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses the Cisco UCCE product mainly in Lab configurations as a means to test out new features, perform AppDev on our offerings, perform POC or demos for clients, and/or to replicate a problem that a client may be experiencing.

Cisco UCCE is a full Omni-Channel capable routing platform that works with several industry third party applications to provide a robust and rich customer experience.

Pros and Cons

Provides a great cradle-to-grave reporting capability of a customer journey through the Customer Contact Center.
Integrations with numerous third-party vendors providing the end-user several choices in vendors offering similar offerings.
The User community is vast, yet tight knit and collaborative spirited.
Documentation set is vast
Reliable once installed correctly and patched regularly.

After 25+ years, the product still requires experienced and highly skilled engineers to deploy the product properly per Cisco Best Practice guidelines.
Third-party integrations are also very cumbersome and require highly skilled and experienced engineers and significant time and financial investment to deploy.
Upgrading the product is cumbersome and requires Cisco ATP or Cisco AS which is time consuming and very expensive.

Return on Investment

Without our Lab we would not be able to maintain our Partnership and Certification statuses with Cisco so the ROI is monstrous for our organization.

Alternatives Considered

Genesys PureCloud, Genesys PureEngage, NICE inContact CXone, Calabrio ONE and NICE Engage Platform

I am typically post RFP and selection process, but clients that have selected UCCE over the competitors are the clients that are not quite ready to embrace cloud or SAAS solutions, or they have selected Cisco due to reputation and long-term stability suitability.

Clients want to know that the vendor they selected will continue to invest heavily in features and functionality improvements as well as maintain a viability in the marketplace.

Support Rating

I am slightly biased as I require very little support these days to accomplish what is needed in the platforms. However, when I engage support with an issue and I present them a complete package and all required details up front, they are swift in their review and response with a resolution. Most of the time there is already an existing fix readily available.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Unified Contact Center delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Unified Contact Center's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Unified Contact Center live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Cisco Unified Contact Center go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Unified Contact Center again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Genesys PureCloud

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCCE) is best suited in the Large Enterprise Contact Centers that are geographically diverse (over 4K seats), and need to still support older ACD or PBX investments or have a need for a central routing platform to complement an array of ACD or PBX vendor connections.

Nice InContact and Genesys PureCloud offerings are better suited to survive the next 5-10 years as they require less investment in deployment and implementation costs, Data Center space, hardware, etc.

Cisco UCCE is still the leader, but for how long?

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Unified Contact Center