ROUTING CONTACT CENTER INTERACTIONS

• US 20120195422A1
• Filed: 02/01/2011
• Published: 08/02/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 02/01/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cisco Technology, Inc. (Cisco Systems, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Cisco Technology, Inc. (Cisco Systems, Inc.)
• Inventors: Famous, Tod
• Granted Patent: US 8,761,377 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 379/265.09
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/51 Centralised call answering arrangements requiring operator intervention , e.g. call or contact centers for telemarketing
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5191 interacting with the Internet
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5232 Call distribution algorithms

Abstract

In one implementation, customer service is managed by a contact center. The contact center includes a contact center server and an agent device. The contact center receives a customer service interaction, which may be a phone call, a text, an email, a chat, or a website communication. The contact center server accesses external social media to identify a social media post by a customer. The social media posts contain clues as to the subject matter of the customer service interaction. The social media post may be filtered by the customer names, product identities, and/or the nature of the post. In this way, information derived from the social media post is used to select an appropriate customer service agent to handle the customer interaction.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

receiving a customer service request;

determining an identity of a customer from the customer service request;

accessing a social media posting based on the identity; and

calculating routing information for assigning a customer service agent to the customer service request based on the social media posting.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the routing information is calculated according to a matching algorithm comprising a plurality of weights.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein one of the plurality of weights is a configurable time range for when the social media posting was posted.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein one of the plurality of weights is location information derived from the social media posting.

5. The method of claim 2, wherein one of the plurality of weights is state of mind information or activity information derived from the social media posting.

6. The method of claim 2, wherein one of the plurality of weights is product identity information derived from the social media posting.

7. The method of claim 2, wherein the matching algorithm involves matching a customer tag cloud with a customer service agent tag cloud.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

filtering the social media posting according to at least one of a language model, a set of keywords, or a contextual model.

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

sending the routing information to an automatic call distributor including an agent skills database.

11. An apparatus comprising:

a memory storing a customer database of customer identities; and

a controller configured to access at least one social media posting based on a customer identity retrieved from the customer database and configured to calculate routing information for selecting a customer service agent based on the social media posting.

12. The apparatus of claim 11, wherein the at least one social media posting is accessed in response to a trigger.

13. The apparatus of claim 11, wherein at least one social media service is monitored according to a customer list.

14. The apparatus of claim 13, further comprising:

a database storing the customer list and the at least one social media posting.

15. The apparatus of claim 11, wherein the routing information is calculated according to at least one of a time elapsed from when the at least one social media posting was posted, a state of mind derived from the at least one social media posting, activity information derived from the at least one social media posting, or product identity information derived from the at least one social media posting.

16. The apparatus of claim 11, wherein the customer service agent is selected by matching a customer tag cloud with a customer service agent tag cloud.

17. A non-transitory computer readable medium encoded with software comprising computer executable instructions and when the software is executed operable to:

receiving a customer service interaction including an identity;

accessing a customer database with the identity to determine a username for an online service;

downloading at least one posting from the online service associated with the username; and

assigning a customer service agent to the customer service request based on the at least one posting.

18. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 17, further comprising instructions operable to:

sending a request for the username prior to receiving the customer service interaction.

19. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 17, wherein the routing information is calculated according to at least one of a time elapsed from when the at least one posting was posted, a state of mind derived from the at least one posting, activity information derived from the at least one posting, or product identity information derived from the at least one posting.

20. The non-transitory computer readable medium of claim 17, wherein the online service is a profile based social networking service, a blog, a microblog, a location based service, or a forum.