As Cisco announced the end-of-sale for Cisco Remote Expert Mobile lots of our partners implementing UCCX/UCCE projects asked us to provide an equivalent replacement for Cisco Remote Expert Mobile/Remote Expert Cobrowse.
So here is the Cisco REM and RichCall for Cisco feature comparison matrix.
| Feature | Cisco REM | RichCall for Cisco |
| Collaboration Features | ||
| 2-way voice (click-to-call for website) | yes | yes |
| 1- or 2-way video | yes | yes |
| application sharing | yes | yes |
| co-browsing | yes | yes |
| remote control of co-browsing | yes | no, read only co-browsing |
| annotation | yes | no |
| cursor spotlight | yes | yes |
| masking sensitive data | yes | yes |
| document push | yes | yes |
| pictures push with annotation | no | yes |
| Application Server and Media Engine | ||
| WebRTC standards-based video for supported browsers | yes | yes |
| HTTP-to-SIP signaling conversion | yes | yes |
| HTTP secure socket through firewall and reverse proxy | yes | yes |
| Residing at the network edge (DMZ) | yes | yes |
| Video transcoding includes VP8 to and from H.264 | yes | yes |
| Audio transcoding includes Opus HD to G.711 and G.711 to G.729 | yes | yes |
| STUN/TURN support | yes | yes |
| Integration with Cisco Collaboration and Contact Center components | ||
| Cisco UCCX/UCCE/PCCE/HCS-CC | yes | yes |
| Gadget for Cisco Finesse | yes | yes |
| Deployment with Cisco UCM only | yes | yes |
| Use cases supported | ||
| Click-to-collaborate for website | yes | yes |
| Escalate phone call to a collaboration session | no | yes |
| Remote mobile camera sharing | no | yes |
| Video kiosks | no | yes |
| Misc | ||
| Deployment model | on-prem only | cloud and on-premise |
| SDK’s | yes | no, to be developed |
| Multitenancy for BPO and hosted contact centers | yes | yes |
For almost 1 year the “House Construction Savings Bank of Kazakhstan» partners with Aurus to offer visual support service to its clients.
The first major use case for video chat is sales interactions with customers. Each page of the Bank’s website has a “Video call” button embedded, which establishes a video-enabled collaborative session with a contact center agent just in one click.
“Of course it affects sales and customer loyalty” – says Erlan Abdykayev, the Director of Project Manegment Dept, – “First, a client doesn’t need to look for the contact details, dial the number and interact with IVR. Second, the co-browsing feature allows us to show how to work with Internet banking software and reduce the time to resolve“.
The video support button is also embedded into Internet-banking web applications. The co-browsing feature allows the client to share his webpage with the agent and get a visual assistance on how to complete the transaction. This tool significantly reduces the time needed to support existing users.
Erlan Abdykayev – “We already process several hundreds of videochat interactions daily and we’re going to use this channel in other customer service scenarios. For example we’re going to use identity verification video calls to allow our NEW customers to purchase online without even meeting the bank representative“.
About the Bank
“House Construction Savings Bank of Kazakhstan” JSC is the only bank in the country implementing housing construction savings system. HCS system is intended for improvement of housing conditions of people through attracting funds of depositors to housing construction deposits and granting them with housing loans.
Hire Slow, Fire Fast 🙂
I am personally a fan of Trollope – he literally reinvented Cisco Collaboration business burying failed projects merciless and strengthening the cloud strategy. But I guess we can assume Amy Chang is also a very bold female who continues Trollope’s initiatives.
I was recently contacted by a Cisco guy asking about our video and co-browsing for UCCX and I wondered why not use Cisco Remote Mobile Expert and guess what? They shutting it down!
Cisco Remote Mobile Expert was first introduced in 2015. I believe it was built by a tiny collaboration team Assemblage acquired by Cisco in 2014. It was quite a high-tech solution (WebRTC, HTML5, co-browsing and all that stuff) integrated into Cisco Finesse desktop.
And still Chang stopped it – https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/customer-collaboration/remote-expert-mobile/eos-eol-notice-c51-741854.html
The migration option is quite controversial – existing REM customers should consider migrating to Cisco Customer Journey Platform (former BroadSoft Customer Journey Platform) but I failed to find WebRTC and co-browsing features in its datasheets.
Why?
IMHO, Cisco is good in platforms, but not always in applications. They build (or acquire) one of the best communication platforms on the market AND they support the ecosystem of solution partners which use their developer tools to build various apps on top. Examples:
REM is an app. Without any API and customization capabilities offered. But there are way too much various business cases for a web-collaboration with customer. Therefore the software should provide tons of tiny features covering the needs of all customers. Not a platform approach.
Ok, so you need to enable post call surveys on your Cisco UCCX. There are several approaches depending on the software you currently use and your requirements to surveys.
Hopefully you’re using Cisco UCCX 11 and higher with Cisco Finesse and in that case you can confugure the Post Call Treatment native feature of UCCX.
When enabled, it redirects the client to the pre-configured DN after the agent hangs up.
IMPORTANT: the agent must use the Finesse End button rather than his IP phone.
More info on UCCX post call treatment – https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-express/119428-technote-uccx-00.html
In case you are still using CAD you can add a button using CDA that performs the Blind Transfer action to the required DN.
You need some app to receive the transferred call and interview the customer. And here you have several options depending on your requirements.
If your goal is just to allow your clients rate your agents by pressing a digit on the phone (DTMF), you may use Aurus PhoneUP Call and Screen Recording software for UCCX.
It supports the Dictaphone feature which answers the incoming calls, plays the pre-recorded message (like “Please leave your feedback”) and then records the voice of the client until he disconnects. In the next version it will also record DTMF tones sent by the client.
So it’s not a post call survey app, it is a call recording software which can ALSO be used to configure a SIMPLE “voice of the customer” feature. And it doesn’t cost anything – the free PhoneUP promo bundle contains a 3-seat call recording license.
If you need your survey to have multiple questions, organized in a tree then:
1. You may create a UCCX script for your survey. This will require special UCCX programming skills, though there are several examples available like this one.
2. If you use some contact center quality management bundle from major vendors you may have this feature on-board.
3. You may google for a special app from 3-rd party vendors.
This script was created to upload prompts to UCCX for work purposes.
You can download the script from GitHub.
This script can only upload files, you should convert prompt files to the required audio format previously.
The upload functionality is implemented as a shell script. It contains basic cURL, so rewriting it for Windows is quite straightforward.
Upload UCCX prompts via REST Api.
Prompts should be converted to valid audio format (8kbit mono U-law).
Keys by order:
python3 uccxpu.py -f -a testupload.wav -u uccxadmin -p uccxadminpassword -d default 10.10.10.10
Uploading is implemented as a shell script. But it should be no big deal to port it on Windows, it uses a cURL with several parameters, so if you have free time, go ahead.
This post is a translation and an extension to this post – the script was made by the author as well.
We’ve been working on this free WebRTC to SIP gateway for several months and are happy to release it into the wild.
We think it’s more valuable, than other WebRTC to SIP Gateways, because it:
In a nutshell, this is a free version of RichCall without video. If you would like to see how RichCall works with video, schedule a demo and let one of us show you everything..
Here’s what we have initially:
To get CVP statistics data, you should configure both databases as Data Sources for CUIC server. Open CUIC web interface, select Data Source tab and click Create to add a new data source. On the page that appears, enter the connection parameters:
After configuring all the parameters, click Test Connection to check the connection to the database. If the test was successful, it will show the Online status:
Now save the configuration. Repeat the process to configure the connection to the callback database. If everything is correct, both data sources will have the Online status:
After the Data Sources are configured, import the reporting templates for CVP. They can be downloaded from the CVP server (C:\Cisco\CVP\CVP Reporting Templates):
For example, let’s import CVP Call Detail:
Select the file to be imported and select the CUIC folder the imported report should be saved to:
There may be an error during the import. That means you should select a Data Source for the report. Let’s fix it:
The imported report will appear in CUIC:
Now run the report and apply the required filters:
As you can see, integrating CUIC with CVP Reporting isn’t that complicated. Note that in earlier CVP versions the report database name may be different (Cisco documentation contains the default name cvp_db).
This article was translated from the guide on getting CVP reports in CUIC by Dmitry Benda.
Thanks to a local partner SoftBCom Berlin GmbH, a German professional contact center 11880 Solutions AG has successfully deployed RichCall, a remote video support solution. The new tool allows 11880’s engineers to use live video when supporting the software used by remote agents. With RichCall an engineer sees the problem with his own eyes and solves it faster.
This is how it works:
Now the engineer can see the desktop screen through the agent’s mobile camera, understand the context of the issue better and therefore resolve it faster.
Thanks to WebRTC technologies RichCall supports most of mobile devices and users don’t need to install additional software. The whole interaction is encrypted and the data is stored on the on-premise company servers, so it is completely secure.
At the moment 11880 uses RichCall internally, but they also consider to offer video-assistance to their business customers as an optional feature, for example:
Write to us to discuss the use cases for RichCall in your industry.
We have partnered with a software industry professional DJ Dutta to run our operations in India to support local CX integrators and BPO contact centers, so their directors and engineers can meet with him in person to evaluate, how our video chat meets their customer experience and engagement needs.
“We are quite excited about the Indian market and committed to building our business here.” said Alexander Anoshin, CEO and founder of Aurus. “Since the very first steps in India we have enjoyed a positive feedback from the local customers and partners. The market is very open and extremely interested in modern customer engagement software, so landing in Delhi was not a tough decision.”
All the sales and service activities for India & APAC markets are now headed by DJ Dutta, a known professional in the enterprise collaboration industry, based out of Delhi.
“Indian users are always open to try out new products provided such products enhances overall performance of their organizations.” said DJ. “Key aspects they consider apart from product capabilities are long term commitment of the vendor and support infrastructure before investing in any new product. Aurus has started its India operation with the key objectives of empowering partners in research & sales and building India centric products jointly with the feedback of partners. We have received excellent initial response from some of the large customers and partners and we are confident that this response will increase manifold once they use Aurus products more & more.”
Aurus sales model is totally based on a network of qualified partners, so the primary goals of the dedicated entity in India are to extend the partner network, support them in research and sales and deliver value-added apps to contact center agents and end users.
You’re welcome to contact Aurus-India and DJ at +91 98101 70552.
Web Real-time Communications (WebRTC) is an open source project created by Google to enable peer-to-peer communication in web browsers and mobile applications through application programming interfaces. It empowers real-time audio, video, and data transfers without the need for plugins or native app installations. With WebRTC, you can make high-quality, real-time communications applications in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Android, and natively on iOS and Android.
WebRTC was released in 2011, and since then has become more and more prevalent in the real-time communications space. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many other companies use WebRTC to provide fast, reliable real-time communications.
Why do you Need Real-time Analytics?
Real-time communications is a difficult feature and service to provide. Users expect and require reliable, effective communication in their day-to-day lives. Even more than that, dependable real-time communications are crucial for businesses, especially ones with remote workers.
It is crucial that real-time systems are sufficiently fast and predictably share resources. This extends to real-time communications – it is very important that events and messages happen in real time. This leaves little room for error, especially in the moment. Thus, the need for real-time analytics.
What is WebRTC getStats?
WebRTC traffic is transported over the IP network, which is susceptible to network congestion. This can increase latency and packet loss, since routers may need to drop packets to mitigate congestion. Losing packets can result in poor video and audio quality, which may lower the user experience. To ensure the highest possible quality, WebRTC includes a real-time statistics API: WebRTC getStats.
The real-time statistics API is accessible though the webrtc-internals page directly in the browser, or by using the getStats() API call.
What Does the getStats() API Include?
The getStats() API is structured into four separate components.
The Importance of End-to-end Monitoring
At callstats.io, we gather metrics from real-time communications at the endpoints and middleboxes. By collecting data at multiple points, we are able to get a comprehensive picture of the path, and can diagnose the exact origin of the problem.
We look to measure both the network performance of the path between each pair of WebRTC devices and the media performance at each WebRTC device. This covers a slew of metrics related to the playback and rendering of the media streams to give a comprehensive picture. Metrics are aggregated independently for each connection, participant, and conference.
Get Started with WebRTC Monitoring
getStats contains powerful meetrics that can be used in any WebRTC service. To reap the full benefits of the metrics and collect fine-grained time series of a conference requires a significant amount of resources to collect the data, organize the data, and run diagnostics. There are many metrics to monitor, so if you want to roll your own solution, it’s best to start small and choose a few key metrics. Get started today!
Allie Mellen is the technical content marketer for callstats.io, a software-as-a-service company that provides products that measure and manage the performance of real-time media communication.
