Abstract: A method, system and computer program product are provided for monitoring a communication session in a contact center. An agent follows a structured workflow while handling the communications session, and trigger events are defined which are associated with significant steps in the workflow other than (or additional to) the connection and disconnection of the agent with the session. When a trigger event is detected indicating that the agent has reached a predefined significant step in the workflow, an event notification issues to another system of the contact center, such as a statistics package, or a supervisor workstation, or an event aggregator which receives such notifications from many agent stations. In a preferred embodiment, these event notifications are used by an automated outbound dialler to more accurately predict the time to the end of a communications session, thereby providing a better outbound dialling algorithm.

Abstract: A contact relating to a communication being processed in a contact center (such as for example a voice call, video call or chat session) is allocated a unique identifier. A web page is accessible to the remote customer involved in the communication. On entering the unique identifier in the web page the user is provided with a customised page including information regarding the status of the contact (such as for example queue position, queue skillset, and expected wait time) and the user can select options in this page to influence the processing of the contact by the contact center, such as by switching queues, requesting a specific agent to handle the contact or terminating the contact and substituting an email or a callback request.