November 8, 2017
After purchasing Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) for your environment, you are required to purchase licenses for your agents. This process can be tricky, and the rules governing the licensing program can be complex in some areas. To help our clients and those interested in Cisco UCCX, we’ve broken down the licensing process and laid out all of the information below.
Cisco UCCX Licensing Levels
Cisco offers two licensing levels for UCCX customers: enhanced and premium level licensing. In both levels, UCCX licensing is structured around the number of agents logged into the UCCX platform at one time.
For example, suppose you have two shifts of agents throughout the day. There are twenty in the morning shift and ten in the afternoon. You would need twenty licenses in this scenario, because the number of licenses you purchase indicates the maximum number of agents that can be logged into UCCX at one time.
Enhanced Licensing Level
Enhanced licensing offers a very capable feature-set related to inbound calling. You can build complex auto-attendant menus with time-of-day routing and even XML-based holiday logic. Some of the most commonly used features available within enhanced licensing are):
- Conditional routing – routing based on caller input to menus, queue stats, time of day, day of week, caller ID, dialed number, etc.
- Data driven routing from HTML and XML data sources
- Agent selection based on longest available, linear, most handled contacts, shortest average handle time, and circular algorithms
- Agent skill and competency-based routing allowing for routing the most or least skilled agents.
- Priority queuing for VIP callers
- After call wrap-up modes and wrap-up codes for categorizing calls
- Prompt and collect functionality to gather numeric input from callers and route based on it or present it to agents as enterprise data
- Historical and live data reporting
One commonly sighted limitation of enhanced licensing is its lack of native database functionality. For this reason alone, many people will automatically buy Premium licensing, but that is a misstep. If the only reason you’re considering Premium licensing is for database functionality, there is a simpler alternative. Enhanced licensing allows you to call webpages and get back data. You can easily configure a webpage to make a database call and return appropriate data to the Cisco UCCX system.
Truly, Enhanced licensing is an excellent choice for contact centers who are not ready to implement an omnichannel strategy. Enhanced licensing provides intelligent-based routing and a number of other advanced features, but these features only pertain to voice channels. If you are striving towards omnichannel, you should consider the Premium licensing package.
Premium Licensing Level
Premium licensing for Cisco UCCX expands the range of features and solutions supported by your system. Below are just a few of the common reasons people opt for the Premium level:
- Data-driven routing based on JDBC database sources
- HTTP based triggers to call scripts programmatically instead of via a phone call
- SMTP subsystem to allow sending emails from scripts
- Support for executing applications developed in VXML
- Support for REST API calls from scripts
- Outbound preview campaigns, systematically using agents for outbound dialing
- Email queuing (with Social Miner server as back end)
- Web chat (with Social Miner server as back end)
Again, if you’re moving towards an omnichannel contact center, the Premium licensing will be the right package for you. If instead you’re primarily looking for inbound calls, the Enhanced package is better suited. Remember, you can always upgrade your licensing later.
Some Features Are Not Inherently Included With Any Licensing Level
- Compliance recording and advanced quality management can be added to Enhanced and Premium agents.
- Workforce Management can be added to Enhanced and Premium licensed systems.
- Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS) is supported by the Premium license level, but that requires a separate server to perform the actual processing. Plus, additional port licensing is required.
- Progressive/Predictive outbound campaigns. The Premium license supports advanced outbound dialing, but you will need to purchase port licensing for the number of concurrent calls you plan to have the system place.
Mindsight Can Help
Cisco’s UCCX has many features laid out across its various licensing levels, making it difficult to determine exactly what you need. The Enhanced level of licensing still holds an important place for a lot of contact centers, but if you want an omnichannel contact center, Premium is your choice. Let Mindsight help you make the determination. Contact our experienced team. We will answer your questions and determine what UCCX licensing level best suits your unique needs.
In addition, Cisco has hinted at a new Flex model of licensing to be released at some point in 2018. The implication is that this new model will make it easier for customers to alternate between Cisco contact center solutions like Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE), UCCX, Packaged Contact Center Enterprise (PCCE), and WebEx Care.
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