Apparatus and methods consistent with the present disclosure route electronic communications to an appropriate resource that can efficiently and effectively provide responses to inquires included in or that are associated with a particular electronic communication. Methods and apparatus consistent with the present disclosure may be optimized for various different types of communication mediums with different sets of capabilities, requirements, or constraints by evaluating data that may be associated with historical information or with a stream of information.

Apparatuses and methods concerning providing a data-communications contact center virtual agent are disclosed. As an example, user-data-communications between client and participant stations are facilitated as follows, which may be implemented using a data communications server and associated communications circuitry. Service request data is received from users at a participant stations, and context information is identified for user-data-communications between a client station and the participant stations based on the service request data at least one communications-specific characteristic associated with the user-data-communications. The identified context information is aggregated for the client station and used for choosing a data routing option routing data with each user at the participant stations, based on the service request data and the aggregated context information.

A system and method are presented for adaptive skill level assignments of agents in contact center environments. A client and a service collaborate to automatically determine the effectiveness of an agent handling an interaction that has been routed using skills-based routing. Evaluation operations may be performed including emotion detection, transcription of audio to text, keyword analysis, and sentiment analysis. The results of the evaluation are aggregated with other information such as the interaction's duration, agent skills and agent skill levels, and call requirement skills and skill levels, to update the agent's profile which is then used for subsequent routing operations.

This disclosure describes management of a contact center executing in a service provider network. The management may be performed by using one or more trained deep learning/machine learning (ML) models. The ML models may be trained using metrics and data gathered from the various services and systems in the service provider network used to implement the contact center. The trained models may be used for forecasting staffing needs, e.g., agents, for the contact center, scheduling agents, detecting anomalies with regard to customer traffic, e.g., received communications from customers, at the contact center, adherence of agents to the scheduling, and dynamically routing of received communications to appropriate agents (e.g., based on skills of the agent and other factors) for handling of the communications.

A communication between parties over a network may be performed to complete a specific workflow and thereby complete a task. Portions of the workflow may be performed during the communication and others performed after the communication has ended. However, a standardized workflow may have variations, such as when portions to complete after the call has ended may have been completed during the communication or when an agent provides additional or alternative tasks. By analyzing the conversation, such as with a neural network or other artificial intelligent system, the portion of the second workflow to be completed after the communication has ended may be produced that accurately reflects the tasks to be completed.

A method for providing anonymized contact information to a workforce management system includes receiving contact information from a plurality of customer business units; assigning each of the plurality of customer business units one or more industry classification codes or product classification codes; anonymizing, by a processor, the contact information to the one or more industry classification codes or product classification codes; receiving, by a processor, a query from a workforce management system for anonymized contact information in one or more industry classification codes or product classification codes; and providing the anonymized contact information to the workforce management system for use in a workforce management predictive model.

The present invention is a system and method of routing incoming communications to a CSR and providing guidance to the CSR based on the incoming communication using feedback information such as sentiment feedback, survey feedback, and feedback from actions taken by CSRs based on skill level. A CEC system receives an incoming communication, analyzes the communication and creates metadata based off of the analysis. The metadata is used by the RAE routing module to route the communication to an appropriate party. The metadata is also used by the GAE guidance module to determine the guidance to provide to the CSR. The CSR then performs an action based on the guidance. The CEC system continues to monitor the interaction until the interaction is completed. The communication metadata, the communication, the guidance, and the CSRs action are all provided to a RAS rules analysis module wherein the RAS analyzes the data and automatedly updates the rules (RAR and GAR) according to the analysis.

A method of assisting an agent in real-time includes receiving a call interaction between a customer and an agent; identifying words spoken in the call interaction; providing the words to a behavioral models module; computing a score for a plurality of behavioral metrics; providing a phrase formed by the words to a knowledge article selection module; providing each score for the plurality of behavioral metrics to the knowledge article selection module; providing a plurality of knowledge selection rules to the knowledge article selection module; evaluating a combination of the phrase and the scores of the plurality of behavioral metrics against each of the plurality of knowledge selection rules; matching a knowledge selection rule to the combination; selecting a knowledge article associated with the matched knowledge selection rule; generating a visual representation of the selected knowledge article; and presenting in real-time the visual representation on a graphical user interface.

A method and apparatus for scheduling agents in a call center to meet predefined service levels, wherein communications are associated with queues representing categories of communications, the queues including at least one concurrent queue of concurrent communications, wherein multiple concurrent communications can be handled concurrently by a single agent. The method includes executing a simulation to determine an effectiveness of plural agents. The simulation includes computing a skill group weighting (SGW) for each agent for at least one concurrent queue and at least one interval based on: t.sub.c, the time spent by the agent on queue C communications t.sub.all, the time spent by the agent on all concurrent communications t.sub.e, the elapsed concurrent time for the agent t.sub.n, the non-idle time of the agent; and Agents are scheduled based on the SGW and max capacity of concurrent communications for each agent.

A system for performing contact center agent scheduling according to an embodiment includes at least one processor and at least one memory comprising a plurality of instructions stored thereon that, in response to execution by the at least one processor, causes the system to generate a workload forecast indicative of a demand that will be introduced into the contact center in a future planning period based on a workload forecast model and time series data, generate a staffing requirement forecast indicative of a number of agents required to handle the workload forecast based on the workload forecast, one or more service goals, and a staffing requirement model, and perform schedule optimization using column generation to generate an optimized contact center agent shift schedule for a plurality of agents based on the staffing requirement forecast and one or more constraints.