Arrangement for using dynamic metrics to monitor contact center performance

摘要

This invention relates generally to contact centers, also variously referred to as call centers, automatic call distribution systems, and telemarketing systems, and relates specifically to performance-monitoring of such centers. Existing contact-center monitoring arrangements tend to have a narrow focus and tend to concentrate either on call routing or on monitoring a limited set of attributes while the contact center is operational. An arrangement (100) for monitoring contact-center (104-108) performance automates the monitoring process by using a database schema (250-270) that records (200-224) the contact center to be monitored, its skills, the locations where the skills are located (in the case of a distributed contact center), the objective or target value for a given skill attribute (such as average speed of answer, maximum delay, etc.), the acceptable deviation from the objective (tolerance), the maximum acceptable deviation between locations (in the case of a distributed contact center), the periodicity or frequency of the monitoring, and the comparison operator needed to determine how a given observed or actual value for the skill attribute is to be compared with its specified objective and tolerance. The performance metric determination is thus dynamic: that is, performance is determined "on the fly" at run time at the time that the contact center is polled for performance-indicative data, and there is no a-priori fixed formula of how to compare an observed skill-attribute value with its specified objective and tolerance to determine a metric for a specified contact center. The result of each poll is sent to a party that is responsible for the contact center, such as a requestor who requested the monitoring.