Abstract: Call center supervisors require information about the performance of call center agents in order to manage them appropriately. Previously this information has been provided in two general forms. Current information in the form of statistics such as queue lengths, numbers of active agents, etc. and historical information in the form of aggregate data such as the average waiting time over a 15 minute period. At present supervisors have no means of accessing information about the state of a call center at a particular past time instant. The present invention provides this information by using a pegging engine to extrapolate from statistics about behavior of the call center at a past time instant to values of those statistics at a required past time instant. Information about events occurring in the call center is used in order to carry out this extrapolation.

Abstract: Call center supervisors require information about the performance of call center agents in order to manage them appropriately. Previously this information has been provided in two general forms. Current information in the form of statistics such as queue lengths, numbers of active agents, etc. and historical information in the form of aggregate data such as the average waiting time over a 15 minute period. At present supervisors have no means of accessing information about the state of a call center at a particular past time instant. The present invention provides this information by using a pegging engine to extrapolate from statistics about behaviour of the call center at a past time instant to values of those statistics at a required past time instant. Information about events occurring in the call center is used in order to carry out this extrapolation.

Abstract: A trigger signal from a remote location can be used to automatically trigger a call from a telecommunications device. The device is preferably a programmable telephone which stores a dialling program which monitors a communications channel for a trigger signal. The user, who may be a call centre customer, selects an option to automatically initiate a call rather than holding for an agent. The call centre system then places a contact request in the call queue alongside identifiers relating to real time holding calls. When the contact request reaches the top of the queue, a trigger signal is sent to the customer's device where it activates the dialling program, causing a call to be made to the call centre. This incoming call is recognised at the call centre as relating to the contact request at the top of the queue and the call is connected directly to an agent, bypassing the other holding calls.

Abstract: A method arid apparatus for generating probe packets for network measurements, in which a first probe packet is generated by normal routing through a protocol stack, following which a packet processor determines, from the routing information added by the stack, a template for generating a series of packets. Based on parameters supplied to the packet processor, a complete stream of probe packets for measuring network performance to a remote endpoint can be generated without further use of the protocol stack. Also provided is a receive-end apparatus and method which determines, by processing a single received probe packet, the format necessary to loop back further packets received in a stream from the same source, and generates the return headers allowing each packet in the stream to be looped back without further involving the protocol stack.

Abstract: Web-based telephony applications have recently been developed whereby a user is able to access a web-site and click on links or buttons in order to establish a voice over internet protocol telephone call from for example, his or her PC phone, to another user at another telephone terminal (PC phone or other suitable type of telephone). By enabling a web-based telephony application to receive URIs containing time information it is possible to enable telephone calls (including conference calls) to be initiated automatically at specified times or for feature keys on a user's telephone terminal to be programmed such that when activated at a particular time, a specified telephone call is initiated. In addition, URIs comprising time information may be used to set up “follow-me” functionality whereby all calls to a particular user are directed to different pre-specified directory numbers depending on the time of day.

Abstract: A method of providing media content, such as music and video, to callers on hold involves the generation of the media content locally in the environment of the held caller, rather than the transmission of the content over the network. The local call server of the held caller is signalled when the call has been placed on hold by the server which has placed the call on hold. The caller's server then activates a music-on-hold server (or other media content generator) to provide the media content directly to the caller's telephony terminal. The advantage of this is that the media content is not transmitted across the network, allowing a higher bandwidth to be used locally for the media content without utilising wide area network resources. This results also in the media content being provided in a higher quality format to the caller, avoiding the loss of quality associated with transmitting music using compressive voice codecs over packet-based networks.