Lucent Technologies has extended its CentreVue call center software with Advocate and Virtual Routing expert system software developed by Bell Laboratories, using five predictive algorithms to schedule queuing callers by such factors as the needs of the caller, potential business value and desire to wait. The software analyzes the skills of available agents, predicts how soon they are likely to become available, and then decides which agents should be matched to which callers, regardless of their position in the queue. This balances the workload of the agents as well as matching them to their best prospects. It will be beta tested over the first half of this year by Crestar Financial Corp, a regional bank with more than 500 branches, with general availability expected in the US by the second quarter, elsewhere by year-end. Prices will range from $20,000 to $160,000.
