Importance

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Abstract

A system and method for predicting the wait time of a caller to a call center is disclosed. The call center associates a set of agents to which the caller may be queued. This set of agents selected may depend on the skills that each agent possesses, the type of service request made by the caller, caller priority, time of day, day of week and other conditions. An initial wait time estimate may then be given to the caller who is just queued. As a caller's conditions may dynamically change, a caller's position in the queue may also change as well as the pool of available agents. Periodic wait time estimate updates may also be given to the queued caller. A caller's wait time may be estimated based upon mean inter-arrival times for recently past calls into the call center. An average inter-arrival time may be calculated for the last several calls. Alternatively, a caller's wait time may be estimated based upon calls that are recently queued and dequeued. A table of values, W.sub.nj, are maintained wherein each such value denoting the jth recent wait time of calls arriving with n calls already in the queue. An average value, W.sub.n, for each n among all such W.sub.nj, is thus calculated and a caller's estimated wait time is thus given, depending on how many calls are in the queue at the time of calling.

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First Claim