Patent ID: 6970829

Claim:
A method of allocating and scheduling requirements for agents in a multiple location, skills-based contact center environment organized into a hierarchy of one or more aggregated contact types at a first level, multiple contact types at a second level, and two or more management units at a third level, comprising the steps of: (a) creating a set of contact allocations that define how forecasted contacts are allocated from each of the one or more aggregated contact types at the first level to the multiple contact types at the second level, with each contact type of the multiple contact types at the second level being defined by one or more queues all located at a geographically distinct location, there being at least two or more geographically distinct locations in the multiple location skills-based contact center environment, wherein the step of creating a set of contact allocations allocates the forecasted contacts using agent availability data per each of the contact types of a given aggregated contact type and each time interval to be allocated, and wherein agent availability data is predicted by schedule simulation of agents working their schedules and handling contacts in the skills-based contact center environment; (b) creating a set of agent requirement allocations that define how agent requirements are allocated from the multiple contact types to two or more management units, each management unit defining a collection of agents at least some of whom have multiple skills wherein the step of creating a set of agent requirement allocations allocates the forecasted agent requirements using agent availability data per each of the contact types of a given aggregated contact type and each time interval to be allocated, wherein the agent availability data is predicted by schedule simulation of agents working their schedules and handling contacts in the skills-based contact center environment; (c) allocating forecasted contacts and forecasted agent requirements based on the created contact and agent requirement allocations; (d) using the allocated forecasted agent requirements to generate a schedule for each of the plurality of scheduled agents; and (e) repeating steps (a)â€“(d) until an output of a set of contact allocations and a set of agent requirement allocations occurs; wherein at least the schedule simulation and at least one of steps (c)â€“(e) are performed at least in part through one or more processing devices.