| Patent Number |
Title Of Patent |
Date Issued |
| 6973176 |
Method and apparatus for rotating auto reserve agents |
December 6, 2005 |
| The present invention relates to the reservation (or holding back or restricting) of agents with respect to work requiring particular agent skills. In particular, the present invention allows a limited number of agents to be reserved based on agent occupancy or on a number of agent s |
| 6847714 |
Accent-based matching of a communicant with a call-center agent |
January 25, 2005 |
| The accent of a party to a call is determined from a speech sample of the party and the call is sent for servicing to a call-center agent who has skill in the determined accent, and preferably to an agent who speaks both the determined language and the language of the accent. |
| 6661889 |
Methods and apparatus for multi-variable work assignment in a call center |
December 9, 2003 |
| A multi-variable work assignment process is used to assign work items, such as voice calls, e-mails and other communications or tasks, to agents in a call center. The multi-variable work assignment process determines whether values of a particular variable characterizing the work items f |
| 6614903 |
Methods and apparatus for service state-based processing of communications in a call center |
September 2, 2003 |
| A call center is configured to determine which of a number of designated service states is associated with a particular skill or type of communication supported by one or more agents of the call center. A particular one of the states represents a branded service level, while other st |
| 6563920 |
Methods and apparatus for processing of communications in a call center based on variable rest p |
May 13, 2003 |
| A call center is configured to determine variable rest periods for one or more agents, based at least in part on factors such as call center service state and agent occupancy. The call center service states may include a number of designated service states associated with a particular sk |
| 6535601 |
Skill-value queuing in a call center |
March 18, 2003 |
| Calls or other communications requiring a particular skill for handling are placed in a corresponding skill queue in a call center. One of a plurality of different values is assigned to each of the communications in the skill queue, with each of the values corresponding to a particular l |
| 6359982 |
Methods and apparatus for determining measures of agent-related occupancy in a call center |
March 19, 2002 |
| A call center is configured to include a capability for generating measures of occupancy for one or more agents. At least one value characterizing an occupancy measure determination for a given agent is stored in a memory associated with the call center, and used in generating an occupan |
| 6192122 |
Call center agent selection that optimizes call wait times |
February 20, 2001 |
| Selection of a suitable call-center agent (106-108) to handle a call is based on which available suitable agent's handling of the call will tend to optimize call wait times. When a call needing a particular skill becomes available (200), all skills of agents in the agent queue (131-139) |
| 6173053 |
Optimizing call-center performance by using predictive data to distribute calls among agents |
January 9, 2001 |
| Selection of a call-center agent (106-108) to handle a call is based on which available agent's handling of the call will tend to optimize call-center performance criteria such as efficiency (e.g., minimize per-call handling time) or derived benefit (e.g., maximize revenue). Each age |
| 6163607 |
Optimizing call-center performance by using predictive data to distribute agents among calls |
December 19, 2000 |
| Selection of a call for handling by a call-center agent (106-108) is based on which call's handling by the available agent will tend to optimize call-center performance criteria such as efficiency (e.g., minimize per-call handling time) or derived benefit (e.g., maximize revenue). Each |
| 6088441 |
Arrangement for equalizing levels of service among skills |
July 11, 2000 |
| In a skills-based ACD, an available agent is reserved and assigned to handle calls needing a "rare" skill of the agent and is prevented from handling calls needing a "common" skill of the agent even if calls needing the common skill are waiting to be handled, if not reserving the agent f |
| 5982873 |
Waiting-call selection based on objectives |
November 9, 1999 |
| Call-center (FIG. 1) performance is improved by assigning different service-time objectives (222) to different types of calls or to call queues (21) for different types of calls, and then selecting (212), for an agent (25) who has just become available (200) to handle a call, a waiting |
| 5905793 |
Waiting-call selection based on anticipated wait times |
May 18, 1999 |
| The maximum wait time for callers in a call center (FIG. 10) is lowered by selecting, for an agent (25) who has just become available to handle a call, a highest-priority waiting call that would most likely wait the longest if it were not selected at this time. Anticipated wait times are |
| 5828747 |
Call distribution based on agent occupancy |
October 27, 1998 |
| A call-distribution function (150) of an ACD system (101) improves the equity of distribution of calls to agents (106-108) by basing the distribution on the agents' individual occupancies. Illustratively, determining an agent's occupancy involves either determining (304) how many cal |
| 5721770 |
Agent vectoring programmably conditionally assigning agents to various tasks including tasks oth |
February 24, 1998 |
| An ACD system (101) is programmable by an operator of the ACD system to automatically change the work of a call center agent (106-108) in order to maximize the agent's productivity and to provide a variety of work balanced with "breather" time in order to prevent agent burn-out. The |
| 4486626 |
Method of and system for limiting access to a group of telephone trunks |
December 4, 1984 |
| After a telephone switching system user has dialed sufficient digits to identify a call as extending beyond the system, the system attempts to route the call over trunks which will result in the least expense to the user. If all of these trunks are busy, the system then searches to find |
