Contact Center with Mobile Agents

Abstract: A Contact Center assists a company with customer relations such as support and telemarketing using telephones but also with email, SMS and chat. Incoming calls are routed by the contact center to the best match according to the polices set up and the queue status. In a contact center context the person handling the calls is called an agent. It would be beneficial to be able to reach agents which are not at the contact center but at home or in the field. This master thesis investigates how such a mobile agent can be connected to acontact center with respect to security, handling more than just voice interactions (i.e. chat and email) and requirements on network infrastructure from a mobile perspective. A prototype client is developed using Java ME connecting to a Genesys contact center, describing the requirements a client has on network, mobile device and security. The results show that eventhough a mobile agent is possible using todays technologies, some features still need to be added to the mobile phones API, such as better call control and keeping focus during incoming calls.