A contact center system is a computer-based system that provides call and contact routing for high-volume telephony transactions, with specialist answering “agent” stations and a sophisticated real-time contact management system. The definition includes all contact center systems that provide inbound contact handling capabilities and automatic contact distribution, combined with a high degree of sophistication in terms of dynamic contact traffic management.

Contact center systems are defined as follows:

They are software applications typically residing on an adjunct server or switch-based processor system, located either at a customer’s premises or at a third-party site. For routing phone calls, the system providing the call control may be an application-specific resource or may support a dual-function PBX/automatic call distributor installation. Newer architectures will support contact center call routing business rules on an “application server” which can direct and monitor calls through a telephony gateway using SIP or other softswitch protocols. The infrastructure may also be provided as an on-site “managed service;” as an off-site, dedicated “hosted service” solution; or as an off-site shared resource “software as a service” (SaaS) solution.

They provide intelligent routing of an incoming communication (that is, a call, e-mail, text chat, Web collaboration or facsimile) to the appropriate resource (that is, agent-assisted or self-service) through an algorithm more sophisticated than simple hunt groups.

They provide the ability to generate historical activity reports (covering at least 30 days) as well as supervisory capabilities including, but not limited to, real-time monitoring and reporting of a system’s workload, agent status lookups, viewing the number of contacts in the queue, and the ability to change agent status.