Patent ID: 8891747

Claim:
A contact center for servicing a plurality of contacts received from a plurality of customers, comprising: a plurality of workstations corresponding to a first set plurality of resources; a central server in communication with the plurality of workstations, comprising: at least one queue of contacts, each of said contacts in the at least one queue of contacts having an associated service time goal; and a workload monitoring agent operable to: generate, based at least in part on said at least one queue, an ordered set of items related to a plurality of work items corresponding to contacts in the at least one queue analyze said ordered set, wherein the analyzing step determines a required service time goal for each of the plurality of work items, wherein at least one of the following is true for a selected service time goal; (i) the selected required service time goal corresponds to multiple of the work items; (ii) the selected required service time goal does not correspond to any work items and wherein the selected required service time goal is more impending than another selected required service time goal that corresponds to at least one of the work items; based on said analysis, determine a state of said at least one queue; forward a work item, in the at least one queue, to workstations of the first set of resources; and when there is a surplus of work items, additionally forward a work item to workstations of a second set of resources.