Patent ID: 7899774

Claim:
An interactive expert system for facilitating interactive sessions within a network between customers and experts based upon particular expertise designations assigned to particular ones of the experts, the system comprising: a set of interactive expert stations coupled to the network, each interactive expert station being associated with a location; a set of expert studios providing expertise in potentially many different categories, each expert studio being associated with an expertise, wherein the expert studios include information about products or services that provide an environment representative of products or services associated with a type of expert station for which expertise is provided; and an expert server, operating on a node communicatively coupled to the set of interactive expert stations via the network, for maintaining information indicative of availability of expert studios and expertise with which each available expert studio is associated, and for matching requests from the interactive expert stations to ones of the set of expert studios based upon a type of needed expertise, the expert server comprising: mapping information associating a current interactive expert station location with a type of expertise provided by one or more of the set of expert studios; a matching component for pairing a query from a requesting expert station of the set of interactive expert stations to an available expert studio of the set of expert studios based, at least in-part, upon the type of expertise associated with a current location of the requesting expert station, the current location being established via the mapping information, and thereafter initiating establishing a primary connection between the requesting expert station and the available expert studio, wherein the expert studios are used to provide guidance to expert station users.