A contact center system and method employing a plurality of agent
workstations, and which includes a queuing component, capable of
receiving contacts of different media-types, such as telephone calls,
e-mails, facsimiles, web chat, voice over internet protocol, and so on,
and maintaining the different media types contacts in a common queue
while awaiting routing to the agent workstations. The system further
comprises a routing component which routes the queued contacts to the
agents based on criteria of the contacts, criteria of the agents, or
both. A media changing component of the system is capable of changing a
media-type of any of the media-type contacts to generate a changed
media-type contact, while the queuing component is capable of entering
the changed media-type contact in the common queue, and the routing
component is capable of routting the queued changed media-type contact to
at least one of the workstations. A contact handling component initiates
an event at any of the workstations in response to the contact being
routed to the workstation, so that an agent at the workstation can handle
the contact as appropriate.