a method , system and computer program product are provided for monitoring a communication session in a contact center . an agent follows a structured workflow while handling the communications session , and trigger events are defined which are associated with significant steps in the workflow other than the connection and disconnection of the agent with the session . when a trigger event is detected indicating that the agent has reached a predefined significant step in the workflow , an event notification issues to another system of the contact center , such as a statistics package , or a supervisor workstation , or an event aggregator which receives such notifications from many agent stations . in a preferred embodiment , these event notifications are used by an automated outbound dialler to more accurately predict the time to the end of a communications session , thereby providing a better outbound dialling algorithm .