Patent ID: 6978247

Claim:
A customer care center comprising: a contact layer comprising equipment defining plurality of media-specific handlers for managing contacts in a plurality of communications media with customers of a business served by the customer care center, each handler adapted to handle a specific one or more of the media, and including connecting the contacts to resources for servicing, collecting and reporting events including contact and resource status, handling the events and assigning the resources according to directions received from a communications layer; the communications layer comprising a processor executing software for managing communications each comprising one or more contacts in one or more media in a media-independent manner according to directions received from a business layer, including allocating resources shared by a plurality of handlers and directing handling of events by the contact layer by applying data from the contact and business layers to decision-making logic derived from dialogs, wherein a dialog describes behavior of the customer care center responsive to the events in a context of at least one of present, historical, and predicted future conditions, and conveying decisions of the decision-making logic to the contact layer, tracking and accumulating events reported by the contact layer, and providing event data to the business layer; and the business layer comprising an interface for defining behavior of the business layer and further comprising a processor executing behavior-implementing software for managing business services by supplying business information that defines the services to the communications layer, including defining workflows of the services, each comprising one or more communications, via the dialogs which are derived by the business layer from business rules, which define schema of the decision-making logic, and which use business data and data from the communications layer to determine the communications and parameters of the communications for the communications layer, wherein: the business layer software manages business services by managing transactions each comprising one or more communications and that provide the business services, by defining the business rules and applying them to the transactions to develop the dialogs which it supplies to the communications layer; the communications layer software translates the supplied dialogs into translations that it uses to control the contact layer and translations that it supplies to the contact layer; and the handlers of the contact layer use the translations supplied thereto to manage the contacts.