Silent Monitor with IP Communicator

ISSUE:

I am having an issue at a client  where the UCCX supervisors can't monitor their agents when using their IP Communicator software.

It works fine when the agents are connected to the desk phones.

1 out of 7 agents are actually working. The obvious difference is the agent has a 7942 phone instead of a 7940.  However, How I don't understand the relationship between the desk phone they are using when the desk phone is disconnected when the agent is using the IP Communicator.

SOLUTION:

Couple of things while using CIPC for monitoring/recording:

1. No named devices. Use the SEP + Mac Address of the local Ethernet interface.
2. Ensure the Ethernet interface can be put into permiscuous mode
3. Ensure you are NOT using a shared line appearance for the IPCC Extension
4. If you are using CAD to do the monitoring/recording, launch the CIPC before you launch CAD
5. If you are using SPAN, ensure the CIPC RTP traffic will traverse the network where the SPAN interface is located.
6. If you are calling phone-to-phone, know that the CIPC will attempt to negoitiate G.722.  UCCX cannot monitor/record G.722. Set the region or call to the PSTN where you can      guarantee a G.711 or G.729 call.

SILENT MONITORING:

Silent monitoring is a feature that enables a supervisor to listen to a conversation between an agent and a customer without the agent detecting the monitoring session. TSPprovides monitoring type in line DevSpecific request for applications to monitor calls on a per call basis. Both monitored and monitoring party have to be in controlled list of the user.
The Application is required to send permanent lineID, monitoring Mode and toneDirection as input to CCiscoLineDevSpecificStartCallMonitoring. Only silent monitoring mode is supported and the supervisor cannot talk to the agent. The Application can specify if a tone should be played when monitoring starts. ToneDirection can be none (no tone played), local (tone played to Agent only), remote (tone played to Customer and Supervisor), both local and remote (tone played to agent, customer, and supervisor).

enum PlayToneDirection
{
PlayToneDirection_LocalOnly = 0,
PlayToneDirection_RemoteOnly,
PlayToneDirection_BothLocalAndRemote,
PlayToneDirection_NoLocalOrRemote
}; 

Monitoring of a call which is in connected state on that line will start if the request is successful. This will result in a new call between supervisor and agent. However, the call will be automatically answered with Built-in Bridge (BIB) and agent is not be aware of the call. The call established between supervisor and agent will be one-way audio call.Supervisor will get the mixed stream of agent and customer voices. The application can only invoke the monitoring session for a call after it becomes active. TSP will send LINE_CALLDEVSPECIFIC (SLDSMT_MONITORING_STARTED) event to the agent call when supervisor starts monitoring the call. TSP will provide monitored party’s call attribute information (deviceName, DN, Partition) to the monitoring party in DEVSPECIFIC portion of LINECALLINFO after monitoring has started.Similarly, TSP will provide monitoring party’s call attribute information (deviceName, DN, Partition) to the monitored party in devspecific data of LINECALLINFO after monitoring has started.

The monitoring session will be terminated when the agent-customer call is ended by either the agent or the customer. The supervisor can also terminate the monitoring session by dropping the monitoring call.TSP will inform agent by sending LINE_CALLDEVSPECIFIC (SLDSMT_MONITORING_ENDED) when supervisor drops the call. The event will not be sent if monitoring session has been ended after agent dropped the call.

WHISPER COACHING:

Silent Call Monitoring is a feature that allows a supervisor to discreetly listen to a conversation between an agent and a customer without allowing the agent to detect the monitoring session. Whisper Coaching is an enhancement to the Silent Call Monitoring feature. Whisper Coaching allows supervisors to talk to agents during a monitoring session. This feature provides applications the ability to change the current monitoring mode of a monitoring call from Silent Monitoring to Whisper Coaching and vice versa. If the application opens the line while the whisper coaching session is already in progress, TSP exposes either the TSPCallAttribute_WhisperCoachingCall or TSPCallAttribute_WhisperCoachingCall_Target bitmap in the CallAttributeType field of LineCallInfo::DevSpecific. Thisindicates whether the call is a whisper coaching call or the target of a whisper coaching call.

Support of this feature consists of the following:

• In the exiting CciscoLineDevSpecificStartCallMonitoringrequest, an m_MonitorMode parameter is enhanced to support an enumeration for Whisper coaching.
• A new CCiscoLineDevSpecific extension, CciscoLineDevSpecificMonitoringUpdateMode, needsto be added that allows the application to toggle between the silent monitoring and whisper coaching modes and vice versa.
• A new LineCallDevSpecific event updatesthe application stating that the monitoring mode has changed.
• A new field, activeToneDirection, is added in the CallAttributeInfo_ExtA0 structure. This field specifies the active tone direction that is being played for the call.

N.B:

It is not possible to execute a barge operation via TAPI.

The suggested approach to achieve what you are trying, would be to use conference - involving an application controlled CTI port.

Another recommendation is to consider the 'Whisper Coaching' feature set, as an extension of the Silent Monitoring.  It allows the functionality you are wanting, but does not allow the customer to hear the supervisor (only the agent can hear him.)  Your application may want to do something like start out in Silent Monitor mode, providing a UI for the supervisor to escalate to Whisper Coaching mode, and then switch to full-on Conference (as above) if he needs to fully join the conversation.