At&t Bell Laboratories

At&t Ipm Corp.

Barbara I Gaechter

Paramdeep S Sahni

Albert Friedes

Susan M Zoccolillo

I Grace Tseng

An outbound call management capability is provided for a public switched telephone network by a network based outbound call management (NOCM) complex, which can be accessed by all subscribers to the public switched network through one or more central offices in the network. A predetermined list of telephone numbers is stored in a data base in the NOCM complex for each subscriber who uses the NOCM services. The telephone numbers are automatically dialed at one or more predetermined scheduled times. When one of the dialed telephones is answered, the NOCM complex sets up a connection through the public switched telephone network between the called party and one or more attendants at one or more telephone numbers specified by a customer of the NOCM services. The NOCM services are made available to any subscriber of the public switched telephone network by provision of a special access code which permits a subscriber who is a customer of this service to dial the NOCM complex which will then interact with the customer by responding to voice or DTMF commands from the customer. The customer may program the list of telephone numbers to be called and program the telephone phone numbers to be used by the NOCM system to connect awaiting attendants with parties automatically called by the NOCM system. The NOCM system customer may set the time for the execution of his calling program by the NOCM system, and may interrupt or otherwise influence or change the execution of his program. All of this may be accomplished without a need to purchase expensive outbound call management premises equipment or to retain the services of a special provider of outbound call management services.

Network based outbound call management

A system for completing a series of calls from a calling party to a plurality of called parties served by a common terminating switch and located in the same general geographic area, is implemented by a) establishing a first communication path from the calling party to the terminating switch b) establishing a second communication path from the terminating switch to the the called party using routing information received from the calling party regarding the called party c) bridging those two communication paths to form a complete connection from the calling party to the called party d) preserving the first communication path and reusing it to complete all the calls in the series.

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Tinton Falls, NJ, United States of America

Barbara I Gaechter