Patent ID: 8064589

Claim:
A method of administering an automatic contact distribution (ACD) system, the method comprising: estimating a minimum number of actual agents required to meet a specified quality of service goal for certain contact arrival information concerning contacts arriving on a selected number of chat channels in the ACD system, chat being real-time communication between one of the agents and one of the contacts via an electronic communication network, and the selected number of chat channels being a maximum number of contacts with whom a single agent will be engaged in chat at any one time, the estimating step comprising: a) deriving an inflated handle time of chat sessions for the selected number of chat channels, each of the chat sessions being exchanges of chat messages, each of the chat messages being a unit of communication composed by a sender who triggers a send event at an end of a composition interval, where the unit of communication is sent in real-time to a recipient upon triggering of the send event, and the inflated handle time being a projected average duration of each of the chat sessions given the selected number of chat channels; b) computing a number of effective agents using an Erlang calculator, the number of effective agents being a minimum number of agents that would be required to meet the specified quality of service goal given the contact arrival information and the inflated handle time, if it were assumed that each of the effective agents were servicing a single chat channel and that an average duration of chat sessions of the effective agents were the inflated handle time; c) obtaining the number of actual agents by dividing the number of effective agents by the selected number of chat channels.