Cisco Finesse External Phonebook Integration for Lumen Technologies

The Challenge

Lumen’s contact center environment runs Cisco UCCE 12.0 across several departments, and each one had ended up with its own version of the truth for who’s who and what number reaches them. Three separate business units each maintained their own directory as a CSV or Excel file — with fields inconsistent enough that a “Last Name” or “First Name” column sometimes actually held a department name instead of a person. On top of that, a nightly export from the Avaya Communication Manager and a separate export from Cisco CUCM each carried their own subset of names, locations, and numbers. And the operators kept a sixth directory by hand — department names, numbers, and notes that lived nowhere else.

These six sources overlapped constantly. The same extension could show up with a different name depending on which feed you checked, and there was no defined rule for which source should win when that happened — just six lists that didn’t agree with each other, and agents left to guess which one was current.

Our Approach

We designed a middleware layer that consolidates all six sources into one authoritative directory, surfaced directly inside Cisco Finesse where agents and supervisors already work.

• Automated ingestion from five sources — the middleware pulls updated directory files from the three business-unit exports plus the nightly Avaya Communication Manager and Cisco CUCM exports on an ongoing basis, so the consolidated directory keeps itself current without manual re-importing
• Duplicate and conflict detection, not silent overwrite — when the same record appears across more than one source with conflicting details, the middleware flags it rather than guessing which one is right
• Supervisor-driven conflict resolution — flagged duplicates are routed to supervisors and operator agents to decide which source’s record should stand, so the “which one wins” rule is a human decision each time, not a hardcoded assumption that might be wrong for a given case
• The operator directory as a preserved sixth source — the manually maintained directory of department names, numbers, and notes is imported as its own authoritative source before cutover, and any hand-written notes are carried forward even after a record gets merged in from one of the other five feeds
• Middleware on customer infrastructure — the consolidated directory runs on a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, deployed on a customer-provided Linux or Windows VM
• Built into the agent’s existing workflow — the merged directory is presented through a customized Cisco Finesse front end built for the environment’s 20 agents and operators, so there’s no separate lookup tool to switch to mid-call

The Result

Agents no longer chase a number across separate lists. Every source — the three business-unit directories, the Avaya and Cisco CUCM exports, and the operators’ own hand-maintained directory — now sits behind a single search field inside Finesse, on the same screen agents already work from. An agent types what they’re looking for once and gets a result drawn from every directory at once, instead of opening each source separately and hoping they picked the current one. The six lists that used to disagree with each other became one directory that stays current on its own, searchable from the place agents already are.

Solution stack: Cisco UCCE 12.0, Cisco Finesse (customized, 20-seat), MySQL/PostgreSQL middleware, automated multi-source directory ingestion

Got contact center agents working across directories that don’t agree with each other? Talk to our team about consolidating them into one source of truth inside Finesse.

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