Contact Center Work Assignment Engine Strategy Pairing
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current work assignment engines in contact centers are limited by their inability to simultaneously consider both work and resource assignment strategies, leading to conflicts and increased customer wait times due to reliance on queues, which can result in suboptimal work assignments.
Innovation Solution
A work assignment engine capable of strategy pairing, which merges and executes multiple assignment strategies, such as work-finding-agent and agent-finding-work strategies, to determine compatibility and prioritize assignments, allowing for simultaneous consideration of conflicting strategies during qualification and scoring phases.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If the work assignment engine only considers one strategy (work or resource), then the assignment process is simple, but the assignment accuracy deteriorates due to strategy conflicts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple strategies (work-finding-agent strategy and agent-finding-work strategy) into a unified assignment process. The work assignment engine simultaneously evaluates both strategies and only assigns work when both strategies are satisfied, thereby resolving strategy conflicts and improving assignment accuracy without significantly increasing system complexity.
2Reliability
If queues are used to control work assignment, then strategy compliance is improved, but customer wait time increases to unacceptable levels
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the strategy compliance control mechanism from the traditional queueing system. Instead of using queues to enforce strategy adherence, the system directly evaluates strategy compatibility during the assignment process itself, eliminating the need for intermediate queueing steps and thereby reducing customer wait time while maintaining strategy compliance.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a strategy evaluation mechanism as an intermediary between work arrival and agent assignment. This intermediary layer checks both work and agent strategies before making assignments, ensuring strategy compliance without requiring restrictive queueing structures that would increase wait times.
3Adaptability or versatility
If multiple queues are created to accommodate different strategies, then resource availability is expanded, but control over work assignment is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal work assignment engine that can handle multiple strategies simultaneously without requiring separate queues. The engine evaluates both work-finding-agent and agent-finding-work strategies in a unified process, maintaining control over work assignment while expanding the pool of available resources that can be matched to work items.
Data Source
AI summary
A contact center is described as having the ability to simultaneously consider a plurality of different work assignment strategies. Specifically, a work assignment engine in the contact center is enabled to create merged strategies from work-finding-agent strategies and agent-finding-work strategies to determine if one such strategy contradicts the other strategy.