Fixing the Append Conversation Quote Issue in Webex Connect (Webex CC)

While testing an Autonomous AI Agent flow in Webex Connect, I ran into a small but annoying problem that is worth fixing early.

The issue shows up in the Append Conversation node. If the AI Agent sends back text that contains quotation marks, the flow may fail instead of continuing normally. At first glance it looks strange, because the bot response itself is valid text, but the node does not always handle those quotes cleanly.

Agent doesn't go into Not Ready state (UCCE RONA)

Hello everyone, 

Today I would like to share a case, which happened at our customer UCCE recently. They tried to configure Ringing On No Answer (RONA) logic in their contact center. However when they tested it, they discovered that if the agent didn't answer the call, his state didn't change to Not Ready as it should be normally. The Agent was still in Ready state, so the unanswered call returned back to the queue could reach him again. Their system was UCCE 12.5 with CVP. 

Enabling chat between the Supervisor and the Agents (Cisco Webex Contact Center)

In this short post I will explain you how to fix the issue, when the Supervisors can't send a text message to one of the monitored agents in Cisco Webex Contact Center. The supervisor complains, the he doesn't see the internal chat icon in his desktop. Here is an example of such a situation:

Digital Channels are not enabled in the Agent Desktop (Cisco Webex Contact Center)

The problem description: Agents complain that when they login to their Webex Contact Center desktops, they can't use the digital channels like Chat, Email, Messengers, SMS, etc. And of course they do not therefore receive any inbound contact from digital channels. 

Read this post and you will know how to fix it. 

IVR Menu with Dial an Extension Option (Cisco Webex Contact Center)

Sometimes, when you develop an IVR application, there can be a challenge of adding Dial an Extension option to a voice menu; i.e you have to do something like this in your menu:

"If you want to do option1, press 1; if you want to do option2, press 2; if you know the extension number of the employee, please dial it now"

What will be the best way to approach this? In UCCE \ PCCE environment you can do it in your CVP Call Studio application using Form and Decision Elements. But what about Cisco Webex Contact Center? The scripting is totally different in Webex Contact Center, and there is no Activity (element) in the Call Flow similar to Form in Studio. After reading this post you will see that it is not a problem at all. 

Why internal calls dialed by extensions fail in Cisco Webex Calling

Today I am going to share with you, my dear readers, some experience of working with Cisco cloud telephony - Cisco Webex Calling. One of my customers received his own tenant in Webex Calling and started using it. So, they received access to Webex Control Hub, they configured some users with extensions for testing, etc. The users could normally login to Webex Application with their accounts and see their extensions. 

However, they were surprised to discover that when they try to make an internal call from Webex App to Webex App and dial extensions of each other, the call just fails. They can hear the message from Webex Annunciator like ""We're sorry, but your call can not be competed at this time..." This not what our customer expected from the newest cloud telephony system, right? ))) Let me tell you, how it was solved.

Create Generated Prompt and Create Container Prompt Steps in UCCX Scripts

In many UCCX scripts a developer can meet a task to spell or pronounce some phrases from intermediate variables whose values are dynamically determined based on runtime script information. For example, the customer enters his information like his credit card number or zip code etc. and the script must confirm it by spelling this value back to the caller. Very often these spoken phrases should be concatenated with other existing prompts (wav-files). There are some interesting steps in the UCCX script editor such as Create Generated Prompt step and Create Container Prompt step. Let's see how they can help you to spell string values and concatenate prompts. 

Saving Information to a Text File in UCCX Repository

Being a Cisco Instructor, I often receive practical questions from my students and customers about some configurations of Cisco UC products. Many scenarios are not clearly described in Cisco documentation and therefore can be found only during real work with Cisco equipment and products. One of these question was related to UCCX. Our customer wanted to save some information like date, time, calling number, etc. in a text file. Actually, the best choice to keep such data is a Database of course, but for some reasons they preferred to save all this in txt format. It is not a problem to do it, but their case was a bit complicated, because they want to update the content of the file after each call and add new rows there with new data. I created a demo UCCX script with such functionality for them and tested it in UCCX 12.5. And in this post we are going to discuss it. 

Understanding Cisco Voice Gateways - Part 4. Digital Voice Ports

In the previous parts of our Cisco Voice Gateway story we identified what analog voice ports are. Also we talked about different types of analog supervisory signaling. Now let's see how we can use our Cisco voice gateways with digital lines such as T1, E1 and BRI. These types of connection are still widely available worldwide. This post maps out the various digital interfaces and explains the differences between them.

Understanding Cisco Voice Gateways - Part 3. Loop-start and Ground-start Signaling (FXS and FXO Ports)

Now you already know what Cisco Voice Gateways are and which types of analog voice ports they can use. It is time to discuss signaling processes on FXO and FXS ports. As it was shown earlier, voice ports on routers and gateways physically connect them to telephony devices such as telephones, fax machines, PBXs, and PSTN CO switches. These devices may use any of several types of signaling interfaces to generate information about on-hook status, ringing, and line seizure. Traditional two wired FXS and FXO voice ports typically use so called Loop-Start and Ground-Start supervisory signaling. I am going to explain how these types signaling work in the in the next few paragraphs.