Importance

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Abstract

Multi-media call centers are able to receive incoming contacts or calls in a plurality of different types of medium. For example, as email, fax, chat, web-based and other types of contact. Incoming contacts are routed to one of a plurality of agents. Each agent has one or more skills, for example, a particular agent has knowledge about sales for product X and about technical support for product Y. Associated with each skill is a queue into which incoming calls are placed until an agent with that skill becomes available. Typically further subdivision of these queues is made such that for a particular skill, there is one queue for each possible medium. Often the queues referred to above build up and end user's experience significant waiting times before reaching a call center agent. This leads to dropped calls and customer dissatisfaction. To avoid this customers are able to switch between queues of different media types (but the same skill type) in order to reduce waiting times.

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First Claim