We’ve recently spoken to several clients who have expressed the desire to reduce the amount they are spending on collaboration and telephony. A route we have taken with a couple of these customers is assisting them in moving away from Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) and using Call Manager to take over responsibility for the required functions. For certain companies, there are quite a few benefits in moving from Cisco UCCX to Call Manager.

The ideal candidate company for this move only uses calling to support its customers via its Contact Centre operations. Without an omnichannel contact centre solution like UCCX, you will no longer be able to communicate with your customers via SMS, Chat, social media etc. If you are not currently using these channels already then please find the potential benefits below.

Get in touch about switching to Cisco Unified Call Manager (CUCM)

The first major benefit comes from the reduction of licensing costs. Because UCCX is a more advanced solution with omnichannel contact centre features, the licenses understandably cost more than CUCM licenses. Therefore your spending is instantly reduced. It is also likely in some cases that businesses already pay for CUCM as well as UCCX licensing for some or all of their employees.

Because of the complexity of Cisco Contact Center solutions, specialised collaboration engineers are needed to manage or make changes to the platform. Highly skilled staff command high salaries. Also finding and hiring these types of engineers can be difficult because they are always in demand. If you switch to CUCM these problems simply go away. Call Manager is a much simpler platform and can be managed effectively with a lot less expertise. You likely already have IT staff who would be more than capable of this job. If you don’t, they are much easier to hire.

UCCX, being an independent platform, requires its own VMware resources which are greater than CUCM. After the switch, you will free up a lot of capacity allowing you to cut down. Similarly to the first point, fewer licenses mean less cost to your organisation if you choose to go down this route. Alternatively, you can keep the additional capacity and use it to increase efficiency for other workloads.

If the change to Call Manager sounds like it could suit your organisation well, we’d be more than happy to guide you through the process. Arrange to speak to a member of our collaboration team and they can answer any of your questions and show you the steps involved over a short call.