Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc.

Paul Cronin

Douglas Michael Gisby

Alec Miloslavsky

Yuri Shtivelman

Oleg Bondarenko

Igor Neyman

Igor Nevman

A computerized telephony call center for serving a customer base has a central switch connected to a plurality of telephones at operator workstations and adapted to route calls to individual ones of the telephones, and also connected to a public switched telephone network, and a first processor connected to the central switch by a high-speed data link and to the telephone network by a digital network connection. The first processor is adapted to monitor transactional activity of the central switch, to process the activity information according to selected routines in the processor, and to communicate processed information to a second processor over the digital network connection. The digital network connection may be a TCP\P connection. In a preferred embodiment the first processor is connected by a local area network (LAN) to network interfaces including a video display unit (VDU) and input apparatus proximate individual ones of the plurality of telephones connected to the central switch. In some embodiments the LAN is also connected to a data server running an instance of a database. In other embodiments the call center, and other similar call centers are all part of a call routing system wherein calls are routed from Service Control Points to call centers over telephone lines, and data is routed to the call centers over a separate digital network connection between processors coupled to the Service Control Points and to the call center central switches. In various embodiments aspects of the invention apply to Internet protocol network telephony (IPNT) calls as well as to conventional telephony calls.

Initial routing of internet-protocol network telephone calls

A queueing system in a call center is adapted to queue voice mails as well as live telephone calls. In a preferred embodiment the calls include both connection-oriented switched telephony (COST) calls and Data Network Telephony (DNT) calls. Callers are enabled to leave voice mail as an alternative to waiting, and records of the voice mails are queued, preferably in the same queue processing the live calls. In some embodiments the call center is enabled to process e-mails, video mails and facsimile messages as well as live calls and voice mail messages, and all types of multimedia communication can be queued in the same queue according to prestored routing rules and priority rules.

Multimedia managing and prioritized queuing system integrated with intelligent routing capability

A communication router receives incoming communications and assigns a priority to each, which are then placed in a routing queue in descending order of priority from the head of the queue, to be routed from the head of the queue to selected destinations. The invention is particularly applicable to routing telephone calls in a call center. Destinations, in the call center agent stations arc selected on a basis of agent availability, and an agent status may be available if the agent is involved in a call of lower priority than a call to be routed. In some embodiments displaced calls may be placed back in the routing queue in order of priority. The invention is applicable to routing a wide variety of communications, such a telephone calls, e-mails, video calls, and Internet Protocol calls.

Growing community of inventors

Saratoga, CA, United States of America

Paul Cronin