Talkdesk, Inc.

Gennadiy Stepanov

Jason Fama

Richard Lawrence

Filipe Valeriano

João Tremoço

Hemerson Tacon

João Matias

Paulo Lapa

A method and apparatus for scheduling agents in a call center to meet predefined service levels, wherein communications are associated with queues representing categories of communications, the queues including at least one concurrent queue of concurrent communications, wherein multiple concurrent communications can be handled concurrently by a single agent. The method includes executing a simulation to determine an effectiveness of plural agents. The simulation includes computing a skill group weighting (SGW) for each agent for at least one concurrent queue and at least one interval based on:

Method, apparatus, and computer-readable medium for managing concurrent communications in a networked call center

A system for scheduling deferred communications is provided. A workload requirement for a deferred queue for each interval of a set of intervals is determined. Each workload may indicate the amount of work predicted for the associated interval. A staffing requirement for an immediate queue is received and may indicate the number of agents needed to handle the immediate communications for the same intervals. The system, for each interval, may consider the number of agents needed for the interval in the immediate queue. Because the deferred communications do not have to be handled at any particular interval, the system may, based on the workloads, schedule agents for the deferred queue where the immediate queue is less busy (a smaller number of agents are scheduled). The goal of the system being to smooth the intervals such that the total number of agents scheduled for each interval across the immediate queue and the deferred queue remains fairly constant.

Systems and methods for scheduling deferred queues

Agents are grouped into skill groups based on the skills of each agent. Simulation are performed for a contact center with multiple queues, where agents from the skill groups are assigned to the queues based on the skills of the skill groups and the skills of the queues. After running the simulations, for each skill group and for each interval, the time each agent spent working using each associated skill is determined, and an average time for each skill is calculated for each interval. The average times are used to create a skill group weight for the skill group for each interval. Later, when the schedule engine is determining an agent placement for one or more intervals, the skill group weights for the intervals are used to calculate a score for the queues based on different agent placements. The placement with the best score (e.g., lowest) is implemented.

Scheduling agents using skill group weights

Growing community of inventors

Hallandale Beach, FL, United States of America

Gennadiy Stepanov