Telephonic communications – Centralized switching system – Call distribution to operator
Patent
1997-07-29
1999-11-23
Wolinsky, Scott
Telephonic communications
Centralized switching system
Call distribution to operator
379202, H04M 356
Patent
active
059913908
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This application claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. .sctn.365(c) of International Application Number PCT/GB96/00727 filed on Mar. 27, 1996.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of teleworking, particularly, but not exclusively, in association with a call centre having switching system, e.g. a Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX), associated with an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) system, such combination being referred to herein as an ACD suite, and to call control apparatus for use with, or in combination with, an ACD suite to provide a teleworking facility.
2. Related Art
With the increasing use of telecommunications equipment in business, including telephones, facsimile machines, answering machines, and modems for data communications between computer terminals, there has been a similar increase in the number of employees who are equipped by their employers to work from home. The employer may pay for an additional exchange line at the employee's home for business telephone use, or the employer may arrange to reimburse the employee for business calls made on the employee's private residential exchange line.
In a call centre it is known to use an ACD system for managing the operation of a switching system, for example a PABX, sometimes referred to as a PBX. There are three types of call centre: those which exclusively receive calls (order taking, customer service, and the like), those which only make calls (telesales, market research) and those which handle both incoming and outgoing calls. In the first and third types of call centre an ACD system is used to distribute or allocate calls incoming to a PABX to a plurality of terminals. These terminals, known in the art as call centre agent positions or ACD turrets, are positions at which people, referred to herein as agents, respond to the incoming telephone calls, and are frequently in the form of a known workstation incorporating a computer terminal linked to a host computer and database system. In call centres which make calls to customers an ACD system can be used to allocate to agents outgoing calls made to targetted customers (i.e. customers selected by the call centre to be the target of, for example, a telesales attempt).
Thus the distribution control systems used for each of the three types of call centre are all referred to in the art as ACD systems since they all respond to the handling by the PABX of an external call to connect the external port (line card) for that call to the internal port (line card) for a turret selected in accordance with the ACD program and to measure the activity at that selected turret to provide data input for data recordal and analysis by the measurement statistics package of the ACD system.
Examples of the use of an ACD suite are Given in the article "Call Centres Doing Business by Telephone" by Martin Bonner, The Journal of The Institution of British Telecommunication Engineers, Vol 13, Part 2, July 1994.
As is known, the ACD system may be programmed from its supervisor position by a supervisor to allocate incoming calls to the agents in a specified manner, for example, calls can be queued and distributed or allocated to the first agent to become ready to accept another call, or where several agents are ready, to the agent who has been ready the longest, or "forced" to an agent whose call handling rate is less than a predetermined limit. The measurement statistics package can determine, for example, the number of calls received, when they are received, how long it took to answer a particular call and how long it took an individual agent to deal with a call and how many calls were dealt with by an agent in a particular period.
ACD is generally performed by an "intelligent" PABX, that is a PABX incorporating an additional processor coupled to its call processing system to provide increased functionality, and in this case the ACD system can be considered to be an integral part of the PABX. In other cases the ACD system can be a physically separate item and link
REFERENCES:
patent: 4400587 (1983-08-01), Taylor et al.
patent: 4757267 (1988-07-01), Riskin
patent: 4800583 (1989-01-01), Theis
patent: 5465286 (1995-11-01), Clare et al.
patent: 5546452 (1996-08-01), Andrews et al.
British Telecommunications public limited company
Wolinsky Scott
LandOfFree
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