Systems and methods for presenting end to end calls and associated information

• US 20060188075A1
• Filed: 02/22/2005
• Published: 08/24/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 02/22/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cx360 Incorporated
• Original Assignee: BBNT Solutions LLC (Rtx Corporation)
• Inventors: Peterson, Patrick M.
• Granted Patent: US 8,102,973 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 379/67.100
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/36 Statistical metering, e.g. recording occasions when traffic exceeds capacity of trunks
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/487 Arrangements for providing information services, e.g. recorded voice services or time announcements
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5166 in combination with interactive voice response systems or voice portals, e.g. as front-ends
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5175 Call or contact centers supervision arrangements
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5191 interacting with the Internet

Abstract

Systems and methods that, among other things, analyze and monitor the performance of a call center including performance of the interactive voice response (IVR) systems, call center agents, and other components of the call center. The systems and methods record characteristics of the call such as the audio data, and analyze that record to identify the events and the actions that take place during the call. These events and actions may be defined as complex customer/call center interactions, such as dropped calls, logic errors or other event. A call center administrator may also identify a set of metrics, such as the number of dropped calls that occur during a day or for each agent, the number of times a client was left on hold for more than two minutes, or other such metrics that may be monitored by the systems described herein. The data collected about these events and the resulting metrics may be stored in a database and provided to a call center administrator through a user interface that allows the administrator to browse through the collected metric and recorded call data and directly review relevant portions of a call that are of interest to the administrator.

Claims

1. A method for generating an annotated log of a call, comprising

connecting into a call by coupling into a circuit on the telephone network,

recording an audio record of the call,

identifying a set of events and associating with a respective event an audio waveform representative of an occurrence of the event,

performing a call analysis to identify within the audio record occurrences of one or more of the identified events, and

associating with the audio record an indicator representative of an occurrence of an identified event within the audio record.

2. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

generating a report representative of the events that occurred during the call, and providing a user interface for allowing a user to select an event and the associated call and to playback a portion of the call related to the event, the portion occurring after a marked beginning of the event.

3. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

generating reports of the events occurring during a call for a plurality of calls incoming to a call center, and generating a database representative of plural annotated calls.

4. A method according to claim 3, wherein generating a report includes

generating a browseable user interface for displaying information representative of audio records of calls stored in the database and for displaying the information as an active link to the annotated record of the respective call.

5. A method according to claim 1, wherein

connecting into a call includes forwarding a call to a recording server having a switch for forwarding the call to a destination.

6. A method according to claim 5, wherein

recording an audio record includes recording voice signals and DTMF tones generated in response to an interactive voice response system.

7. A method according to claim 1, wherein

recording an audio record includes storing a digital representation of an audio waveform.

8. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

generating a graphic display representative of the recorded audio and a set of graphical markers indicating the location of an event within the recorded audio.

9. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

identifying a waveform representative of an event.

10. A method according to claim 9, wherein

identifying a waveform includes identifying an audio signal representative of the event and storing characteristics of the audio signal.

11. A method according to claim 10, further comprising

comparing stored characteristics of a first audio signal with stored characteristics of a second audio signal to determine a difference for distinguishing between the stored characteristics.

12. A method according to claim 9, wherein

identifying a waveform includes identifying a compound signal having at least a first audio component and a second audio component, whereby an event is identified by determining the occurrence in the audio record of the first and the second audio component.

13. A method according to claim 9, wherein

performing a call analysis includes correlating an audio waveform of the recorded call to a waveform representative of an event to determine the presence and location of the event within the recorded call.

14. A method according to claim 13, wherein

performing a call analysis further comprises annotating a recorded call with markers representative of CTI signals.

15. A method according to claim 10, further comprising

allowing a user to define an event and to identify a pattern characteristic of the event occurring within a recorded call.

16. A method according to claim 9, further comprising

allowing a user to add an annotation to a recorded call.

17. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

allowing the user to set up an alert triggered as a function of the events occurring in one or more recorded calls.

18. A method according to claim 1, wherein

an event includes an event selected from the group consisting of an IVR prompt, a broadcast of music, an elevated volume, silence, a touch tone entry, an agent talking, a change of speaker, identification of a which speaker is active, a change of topic, identification of a topic, or a transcript of the words spoken.

19. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

generating a record representative of identified events occurring over a plurality of recorded calls.

20. A method according to claim 1, further comprising

altering an IVR process in response to an analysis of a recorded call.

21. A method according to claim 1, wherein associating comprises an operation selected from the group consisting of marking an audio record, marking a graphic representation of the audio record, and adding an audio cue to the audio record.

23. A system according to claim 1, further comprising

a report generator for generating a report representative of the events that occurred during the call, and providing a user interface for allowing a user to select an event and the associated call and to playback a portion of the call related to the event, the portion occurring between the marked beginning and end of the event.

22. A system for generating an annotated log of a call, comprising

a switch for connecting into a call by coupling into a circuit on the telephone network,

a recorder, coupled to the switch and capable of recording an audio record of the call,

an event database having stored therein a set of events and associated audio waveforms representative of the event, and

a call analyzer for identifying within the audio record an occurrence of one or more of the identified events, and for associating with the audio record an indicator representative of an occurrence of an identified event within the audio record.

24. A system for allowing a call center administrator to generate an annotated log of a call, comprising

a data recorder capable of coupling to a switch and capable of recording an audio record of the call,

an events database having stored therein one or more event representative of patterns that may occur within a recorded audio record and for storing associated audio waveforms representative of the event,

a user interface for allowing a user to select a performance metric representative of a measure of usability for a call center and to associate with the performance metric one or more of the stored events,

a call analyzer for identifying within the audio record an occurrence of one or more of the identified events, and for associating with the audio record an indicator representative of an occurrence of an identified event within the audio record, and

a report generator for generating a report representative of the events that occurred during the call, and providing a user interface for allowing a user to select an event and the associated call and to playback a portion of the call related to the event, the portion occurring between the marked beginning and end of the event.