Abstract: A system and methods are provided for matching electronic tasks with actors able to process and complete the tasks, without polling. When a new task is received and no qualified actor is available, instead of repeatedly polling or querying actors, a task event is emitted that describes the task by criteria that can be used to match the task to a qualified actor. Similarly, when an actor becomes available and no suitable task is pending, instead of repeatedly polling or querying pending tasks, a corresponding actor event is emitted. Consumers of the events therefore attempt to match a pending task and an available actor only when there is a change to the tasks and/or the available actors.

Abstract: The disclosed embodiments relate to a system that maintains status information for customer-service agents in an online customer-support system. During operation, the system receives a request to update status information for a customer-service agent, wherein the request is received at an agent status keeper (ASK) service that provides a centralized repository for status information for customer-service agents, which can be accessed from multiple channels associated with separately siloed products. In response to the request, the system sends a message corresponding to the request to an inbox for an agent actor that operates on status information for the customer-service agent. While processing the message, the agent actor validates an assumed version number for the request. If the validation is successful, the agent actor commits the update by persisting one or more events produced by processing the request, and also publishes the one or more events to an associated publish/subscribe channel.