Patent ID: 8634538

Claim:
A method of handling a telephone call within a telephone network, the method comprising the steps of: (a) providing a multi-tenanted computer-telephony integration (CTI) server located within a telecommunications network and adapted to receive telephone calls via a telephony interface on behalf of a plurality of contact centers located on premises of a plurality of enterprises, the CTI server located outside the premises of the various enterprises; (b) receiving a telephone call to one of the outlets at the telephony interface of the CTI server; (c) using an indicia received with or at the same time as the received call to identify a calling party and to retrieve a profile of the calling party from a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system located remotely from the CTI server and from the plurality of contact centers by matching the indicia to a previously-stored indicia in a call history database collocated with the CTI server, wherein the profile comprises at least a plurality of previous orders processed by one or more of the outlets on behalf of the calling party; (d) if no agent is available to immediately receive the telephone call, queuing the call at the CTI server; and (e) when an agent becomes available, forwarding the call from the CTI server to a telephony device used by an available agent; wherein the CTI server uses the profile for providing priority call handling for high value callers, wherein a caller is determined to be high value based at least on an attribute obtained from the profile of the caller.