ARRANGEMENT FOR USING DYNAMIC METRICS TO MONITOR CONTACT CENTER PERFORMANCE

An arrangement (100) for monitoring contact-center (104-108) performance automates the monitoring process by using a database schema (250-270) that records (200-224) the contact center to be monitored, its skills, the locations where the skills are located (in the case of a distributed contact center), the objective or target value for a given skill attribute (such as average speed of answer, maximum delay, etc.), the acceptable deviation from the objective (tolerance), the maximum acceptable deviation between locations (in the case of a distributed contact center), the periodicity or frequency of the monitoring, and the comparison operator needed to determine how a given observed or actual value for the skill attribute is to be compared with its specified objective and tolerance. Monitoring is then effected (300-366) as follows. Periodically, the contact center is automatically polled for performance data, actual values of the skill attributes are computed therefrom, and the actual values, the objective values, and the tolerances are used in a meta formula to determine the performance metrics. When skills are distributed across several locations of a distributed contact center, the arrangement determines the performance metrics for each location, and further determines whether the maximum deviation between the locations of their actual values exceeds the maximum acceptable deviation. Results indicating performance outages are sent to a party that is responsible for the contact center.