Here’s what we have initially:

• Cisco Unified Intelligence Center (CUIC) collects and displays reports about Cisco contact centers.
• The data for Cisco Voice Portal (CVP) reports is stored on one of its servers, namely the CVP Reporting Server.
• This server contains Informix databases where the statistics is stored.
• And there are two reporting databases on this server:
  • cvp_data – contains the basic data for the reports on the performed calls, trunk and VXML application usage;
  • callback – contains the data for the reports on Courtesy Call Back.

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:

• Name – new data source name;
• Type – database type. Select Informix for CVP;
• Database Host – CVP Reporting server IP address or hostname;
• Port – 1526 (the default Informix port);
• Database Name – CVP Reporting database name. Default: cvp_data;
• Instance – Informix Instance name. Default: cvp;
• Database User ID – Informix database username;
• Password – this user’s password (configured during the CVP installation);
• Charset – character encoding. Select UTF-8 for CVP Reporting Server.

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.

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.

Collaboration for employees has long been the driver of ROI for innovative companies. Companies started using video collaboration to increase that ROI, and they can grow it even larger by using it with customers as well.

The value of video collaboration

Companies use video in collaboration, because it helps them:

• make faster decisions
• improve employee decisions
• provide a more personal experience
• improve teamwork within and across departments
• exchange ideas seamlessly.

Essentially, face-to-face (F2F) video allows high-growth companies innovate quickly.

Also, using video in meetings help companies get the following benefits:

• build trust and positive relationship
• facilitate stronger customer relationship & engagement
• make decisions faster
• keep the team focused and minimize multi-tasking
• help participants retain important information.

Interestingly, the reasons late adopters seek video collaboration is because they want to catch up with the market leaders in terms of decision making and innovation speed. This might explain the discrepancy in new technology adoption I wrote about earlier.

Using video collaboration with customers

The Techaisle research on video collaboration (PDF) found that SMBs can companies can achieve higher ROI, when employees use video collaboration not only with their coworkers, but also with their customers:

The key ROI drivers of video collaboration within departments.
Source: the Techaisle’s whitepaper, “Video-enabled collaboration and business growth: a winning combination”.

Turns out, video collaboration also helps customers in the same way it helps coworkers by:

• building trust and relationships by providing rich in-person experience
• providing better customer support
• achieving high customer satisfaction and retention.

The Techaisle’s research ends with 2 conclusions:

1. Using video collaboration is not about generic upgrades, but a matter of achieving business goals.
2. The data shows that using collaboration is clearly better, than not, and that using video in various functions across the company helps that.

and an inspirational quote:

Pursue the outcomes associated with high-growth, highly innovative businesses. Don’t settle for the outcomes, objectives and technologies targeted by low-growth firms. If collaboration is important to business success – and the data presented here clearly shows that it is – it’s important to align collaboration strategy, activities and investments with the best case outcomes of high levels of business growth and innovation.

Using video chat to improve customer experience

In 2015 Gartner predicted that by 2018 100 of 500 largest companies would’ve used video chat.

“Video chat provides customers with a richer sense of presence, personalized experience by helped coordination of communication and the support of emotional expression, and the real-time sharing of content,” said Brian Manusama, research director at Gartner.

Since customers are becoming more and more familiar with video chat themselves, companies should probably provide this channel to their customers.

While a 2011 Forrester study said that:

• 80% of customers prefer to reach support by phone
• only 7% and 8% prefer to use web chat first or when phone isn’t available,

whole 36% of customers said they’d have liked to use live video to talk with a contact center agent.

If you choose to follow Techaisle’s advice to start using employee and customer collaboration now, then it might be a good idea to look for a customer-facing video chat right now.

If you want to see our click-to-call video chat in action, try it live between 3am and 12pm GMT or schedule a demo, where our expert can help you define, how best to use it in your business case.