Organizations that conduct transactions with customers (e.g., businesses, non-profit organizations, government agencies, etc.) often seek to distinguish themselves by providing excellent customer service. For example, in order to address questions and concerns of potential and current customers, either pre- or post-transaction, organizations may provide telephone numbers that facilitate contact between their customers and customer service agents. To facilitate telephone contact with customers, call centers have been developed as a centralized, scalable mechanism to handle distribution of the received calls to available customer service agents.
The volume of calls received by an organization's call centers may vary significantly depending upon variety of factors. These factors may include, but are not limited to, time (e.g., time of day, month, or year), promotions to increase customer demand, and the like. In order to provide a satisfactory customer experience, it is desirable that sufficient resources are devoted to call centers to respond to projected customer call volume in a timely manner. However, to constrain costs, organizations may also wish to restrict the resources devoted to call centers to meet only the actual volume of calls received.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to scale the resources devoted to call centers to respond to customer calls in a timely fashion. In one example, changing an amount of telephone capacity provided to an organization by a telephone provider may require a waiting period to implement. In another example, network resources used for balancing call loads amongst an organization's call centers and/or customer service agents may require investments in computing resources, as well as time and personnel to implement or dismantle. While telephone capacity and/or network call balancing resources are changed to satisfy differing levels of call demand, an organization's call centers may be over- or under-resourced, hurting customer service or incurring elevated operating costs unnecessarily.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds