Cisco Systems has agreed to buy Latigent, a vendor of call center reporting tools, and plans to integrate Latigent's products with its unified customer contact center systems.

The integrated products will help businesses better manage voice, Web, e-mail and video interactions with their customers, Cisco said Thursday.

Barely one in three businesses with multichannel customer contact centers have a clear idea of how they are doing, according to a report published by Ventana Research in January. Targeted business intelligence tools like Latigent's BlueVue, Hardmetrics' CCPM or others from Informiam and Merced Systems are designed to provide that information.

Call-center operators use the BlueVue reporting tool to filter and search call details generated by Cisco's Intelligent Contact Management software. It can be used to generate either real-time or historical reports, allowing call-center operators to identify which calls queued for excessive periods, or took too long to resolve.

The Chicago company's tools also work with Cisco's IP Contact Center and with systems from Avaya.

Latigent's CEO Chris Crosby and Chief Technology Officer Jason Kolb will join Cisco after the acquisition closes, Cisco said. It expects to close the acquisition -- its 123rd -- by the end of October, and will fold Latigent into its Customer Contact business unit. The companies did not the disclose the deal's value.