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AssigneeNone recorded
InventorsYuri Shtivelman, Alec Miloslavsky, Oleg Bondarenko, Igor Nevman, Douglas Gisby, Paul Cronin, Oleg Turovsky, Konstantin Kishinsky, Nikolay Anisimov, Gregory Pogossiants, Pavel Postupalski
Estimating the term…
A computerized telephony call center for serving a customer base has a central switch connected to a plurality of telephones at operator workstations and adapted to route calls to individual ones of the telephones, and also connected to a public switched telephone network, and a first processor connected to the central switch by a high-speed data link and to the telephone network by a digital network connection. The first processor is adapted to monitor transactional activity of the central switch, to process the activity information according to selected routines in the processor, and to communicate processed information to a second processor over the digital network connection. The digital network connection may be a TCP/IP connection. In a preferred embodiment the first processor is connected by a local area network (LAN) to network interfaces including a video display unit (VDU) and input apparatus proximate individual ones of the plurality of telephones connected to the central switch. In some embodiments the LAN is also connected to a data server running an instance of a database. In other embodiments the call center, and other similar call centers are all part of a call routing system wherein calls are routed from Service Control Points to call centers over telephone lines, and data is routed to the call centers over a separate digital network connection between processors coupled to the Service Control Points and to the call center central switches. In various embodiments aspects of the invention apply to Internet protocol network telephony (IPNT) calls as well as to conventional telephony calls.
A computerized telephony call center for serving a client base, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.
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With call distribution or queueing: interconnection arrangements between ACD systems
Office automation; Time management: computer-aided management of electronic mailing [e-mailing]
Call or contact centers with computer-telephony arrangements: interacting with the Internet
Services and arrangements where telephone services are combined with data services: collaboration services where a computer is used for data…
Term end not estimated
The present invention is in the area of telephone call processing and switching, and pertains more particularly to intelligent call-routing systems.
Telephone call processing and switching systems are, at the time of the present patent application, relatively sophisticated, computerized systems, and development and introduction of new systems continues, including Internet-based telephony systems, which are known in the art as Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT) systems. It is also true that the older telephony call-switching networks, and the more recent Internet telephony systems are beginning to merge, and many believe will one day be completely merged.
Much information on the nature of such hardware and software is available in a number of publications accessible to the present inventors and to those with skill in the art in general. For this reason, much minute detail of known systems is not reproduced here, as to do so would obscure the facts of the invention.
FIG. 1 is a system diagram of a call-routing system according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention.
FIG. 2A is a block diagram representing communication functionality between equipment groups in embodiments of the present invention.
FIG. 2B is a block diagram illustrating a unique call center-level routing system in an embodiment of the present invention.
General Description
FIG. 1 is a system diagram of a call-routing system according to a preferred embodiment of the present invention, comprising two call centers 121 and 122. In this embodiment there may be many more than the two call centers shown, but two is considered by the inventors to be sufficient to illustrate embodiments of the invention. Each of call centers 121 and 122 includes a telephony switch (switch 123 for center 121 and switch 124 for center 122) providing routing to individual agent stations.
Call centers 121 and 122 in FIG. 1 are CTI-enhanced by virtue of a processor connected by a high-speed data link to the associated call center switch. At call center 121, processor 223 is connected by link 212 to switch 123, and at call center 122, processor 224 is connected to switch 124 by link 213. Each processor 223 and 224 includes an instance of a CTI application 207 known to the inventors as T-Server (T-S) 207. Further, each processor 223 and 224 at each call center is in turn connected to a local area network (LAN). For example LAN 301 is shown connected to processor 223 in FIG. 1. No equivalent network is shown at call center 122 for the sake of simplicity, although the architecture described herein for call center 121 may be presumed to be extant at call center 122 and other call centers as well.