What is call blending?

[BabySeal]

Can someone please tell me what call blending is?
Several days ago we had a presentation telling us that our centre would increase its efficiency by more than twenty percent if we upgraded to Genesys release 6.51 and used universal routed service.

the person presenting mentioned that only Genesys can offer call blending with such a high improvement in our centre efficiency.

Does unversal routed service allow outbound calls? It was my understanding that it is used like an automatic call distribution. If this is the case, then how can outbound calls be mixed into it? If this is not a mixture of outbound and inbound calls then what does Genesys Telecom mean by call blending?

[Ralph]

Call Blending refers to prioritizing Calls and other Channels with agents that handle more than a queue (while queue in Genesys not only means a voice queue). Therefore with Genesys Universal Queue you can create routing strategies that do something like the following:

If an agents handles an email and a call with priority x is arriving, "blend" the call to agent and put the email "on hold".

That is generally speaking: Interaction Blending.

[Superglide]

Call Blending (in an inbound context) is just having the ability for a single agent to respond to incoming events be they voice, web email etc They can all be routed via URS to an agent with the given skills. Mind you the agent must still have the capability to action these.

The other term for this is to enable an agent action inbound and outbound calls as diretced by the routing engine (URS in this case). Agent skills need to be aligned in either case though.

Hope this helps.