Lucent and Nortel provide nearly all the call-routing hardware and software in North America.

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They call the process predictive behavioral routing and Forbes reported in 2011 that the software had been deployed in 30, 000 call center seats.

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Such services, which make possible very cheap (or even free) calls by routing part or all of each call over the internet, have forced traditional telecoms firms to cut their prices.

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Instead, they asked what might be possible if their routing systems were intelligent enough to match each incoming call with the optimally qualified service agent.

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