Avaya Inc.

At&t Bell Laboratories

Avaya Technology LLC

Tore L Christensen

Andrew Derek Flockhart

Katherine Anthony Sobus

Alan David Eicholz

Douglas A Spencer

David L Bauer

Gail L Haygood

Steven J Szymanski

The present invention provides various contact center embodiments for interacting with customers using instant messaging. In one embodiment, the contact center is configured to receive instant message notifications from a customer when the customer is available for contact by instant messaging. In another embodiment, the contact center is configured to route sessionless instant messages only to a selected agent for a specified period of time. In another embodiment, the contact center is configured to provide to customers presence information for administered instant message addresses before the customers contact the contact center. In another embodiment, the contact center is configured to perform an outbound instant messaging campaign or alert with customers.

Using business rules for determining presence

A contact center is described along with various methods and mechanisms for administering the same. The contact center proposed herein provides the ability to, among other things, establish and maintain a pool of idle agents so that when an outbound call attempt is successful, the agent which is assigned to the successful outbound call attempt can be selected from a plurality of agents based on the agent's superior efficiency rather than being based on the fact that the agent is the next in line to be assigned to such a contact.

Outbound effectiveness through management of idle agent pool

The present disclosure describes various ways of monitoring the needs of a contact center in real-time and pushing training to a number of agents to address those needs. In determining to push training to agents, the short-term efficiency of the agent is balanced with the long-term efficiency of the contact center. When agents receive and then complete training events designed to address the monitored contact center needs the attributes associated with the agents are updated to allow them to handle the contacts requiring training.

Training optimizer for contact center agents

In a call center (,) associated with a World-Wide Web site whose pages (,) provide a call-request capability (,), the call center receives notifications of page hits and call requests from the Web server (,) and uses these notifications to determine a historical page hits-to-call requests ratio. It then uses the ratio along with current page-hit notifications to predict a volume of calls that will soon need to be handled by the call center and staffing the call center in anticipation of the predicted call volume. The notifications are further used in conjunction with knowledge of information about the content of the Web pages to predict what agent skills will be needed to handle the calls, and to staff agent splits accordingly.

Using web page hit statistics to anticipate call center traffic

Apparatus for facilitating the transport and switching of synchronous and asynchronous digital data signals presented by data terminal or data communication equipments to a voice switching network such as a PBX advantageously without the use of modems. The clock rate of the PBX user's digital data is multiplied by a variable factor to define a synchronous transmission clock rate on a data link between a pair of interfaces, one locally connecting to the data terminal or data communications equipment and the other appearing as a port of the PBX switching equipment. The higher rate on the data link permits both the digital data as well as a control channel to be provided. Variations in the data terminal or data communications equipment clock rate do not affect the control channel. Variations in the voice sampling rate of switching modules serving different groups of ports through which the digital data is transported are accommodated.

Growing community of inventors

Boulder, CO, United States of America

Tore L Christensen