System and Methods for Predicting Future Agent Readiness for Handling an Interaction in a Call Center

In an outbound telephone campaign, a method for predicting the correct number of calls to dial out to best utilize a group of agents working the calls;

• (a) summing the number of available agents waiting to take a call and agents who will be ready to take a call within a specified time window;
• (b) subtracting from the sum of (a) the number of connected calls waiting in queue for an agent;
• (c) predicting the admissible number of calls by adjusting the value of (b) against percentage constants relative to a call hit rate and to a percentage of abandoned calls;
• and
• (d) further refining the value of (c) by subtracting the number of calls in progress.

A system for predicting when one or more agents associated with a call center and reported busy will be available to answer an interaction request comprising:

• a monitoring application residing on the network locally to each appliance connected to the network each appliance operated by an agent;
• a reporting application residing one per appliance for reporting agent progress relative to defined tasks;
• and
• a data processing component for receiving information from the monitoring application and for determining which if any agents will be ready to accept an interaction request;
• characterized in that each reporting application sends notification to the monitoring application relative to current task performance state of the hosting agent and wherein the processing component calculates the time for each agent to become ready to take an interaction based on the reported state information.