Patent ID: 8259923

Claim:
An open contact center comprising: a plurality of contact center components conforming to open standard, wherein said contact center components intercommunicate with each other utilizing open standards, said contact center components together forming an open contact center; said open contact center providing automated interactive communications with callers, providing queue management for callers waiting to communicate with live agents, providing skills based routing for assigning live agents to callers based upon skills of the live agents and skills needed by the callers, and providing tooling for provisioning and monitoring the live agents; each of the contact center components are service oriented architecture (SOA) components, wherein the contact center components intercommunicate via an enterprise service bus (ESB), and wherein each of the contact center components execute independent of other ones of the contact center components within a middleware solution having Internet Protocol (IP) Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) capabilities; the contact center components include an agent desktop component, an agent authentication component, an agent monitoring component, an agent transfer component, an application integration component, a call queuing component, a collaboration integration component, a load balancing component, a reporting component, a skills based routing component, and a supervisor conferencing component; and a set of vendor specific plug-ins each configured to communicate with a proprietary contact center component to permit the open contact center to utilize capabilities provided by the proprietary contact center component; the contact center is configured to simultaneously utilize a plurality of different vendor specific plug-ins, wherein the different vendor specific plug-ins correspond to proprietary contact center components provided by different vendors.