Quality review of contacts between customers and customer service agents

• US 8,503,664 B1
• Filed: 12/20/2010
• Issued: 08/06/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 12/20/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Amazon Technologies, Inc. (Amazon.com, Inc.)
• Inventors: Kaufman, Donald L.
• Primary Examiner(s): SMITH, CREIGHTON H
• Application Number:
  US12/973,715
• Time in Patent Office: 960 Days
• Field of Search: 379/265.06, 379/265.05, 379/265.07
• US Class Current: 379/265.06
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06398 Performance of employee with respect to a job function
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0281 Customer communication at a business location, e.g. providing product or service information, consulting
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 2203/401 Performance feedback
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/00 Automatic or semi-automatic exchanges
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/2218 Call detail recording
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/42221 Conversation recording systems at the subscriber's set H04M1/656
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5175 Call or contact centers supervision arrangements
• CPC Class Codes: H04M 3/5191 interacting with the Internet

Abstract

A user of a personal computing device may identify an item of interest provided by a network-based service for which additional information is desired. Customer service agents (CSAs) of the network-based service may be contacted by the user to respond to queries. To assess the quality of a contact, a contact review service may record the contact between the CSA and the user and edit the contact to reduce its length for ease of review. The edited contact may be submitted to one or more reviewers to obtain reviews characterizing the contact quality. Reviewers may include CSAs not participating in the contact or other human reviewers. The reviewers may return their reviews to the contact review service, which generates a composite review from the returned reviews. The composite review may be employed for CSA evaluation and/or training purposes, amongst others.

Claims

1. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable components, the computer-executable components comprising:

a contact processing component, the contact processing component operative to;

record a contact between a customer and an agent;

edit the recorded contact to remove selected material from the recorded contact; and

sample a selected duration of the edited, recorded contact; and

a contact distribution component, the contact distribution component operative to;

route contacts between customers and agents in communication with the contact distribution component;

identify a agent that is not in contact with a customer; and

transmit the sampled, recorded contact to the identified agent for review of the contact quality.

2. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the contact processing component is further configured to:

receive reviews of the sampled, recorded contact from a selected number of agents identified by the contact distribution component; and

generate a final review of the sampled, recorded contact from the reviews received from the selected agents.

3. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the contact processing component is further operative to edit the recorded contact by one or more of:

removing an agent contribution from at least a portion of the recorded contact;

removing personal information of the customer from at least a portion of the recorded contact; and

removing at least a portion of pauses between words spoken by the customer.

4. The non-transitory computer readable storage medium of claim 1, wherein the contact between the customer and agent comprises one or more of telephone calls, electronic mail messages, short message service (SMS) messages, instant messages, and video messages.

5. A contact review service comprising:

a data store that stores one or more contacts between a first person and a second person; and

a computing device in communication with the data store, wherein the computing device is operative to;

obtain a contact from the data store;

sample a selected duration of the contact;

transmit the sampled contact to at least one reviewer; and

generate a review of the sampled contact based upon responses received from the at least one reviewer regarding the quality of the sampled contact.

6. The contact review service of claim 5, wherein the computing device is further operative to edit the contact by isolating at least a portion of a customer contribution to the contact.

7. The contact review service of claim 6, wherein isolating the contact comprises selecting a portion of the contact near an end region of the contact.

8. The contact review service of claim 5, wherein a reviewer'"'"'s response regarding the quality of the sampled contact comprises a characterization of a satisfaction of the first person during the contact with the second person.

9. The contact review service of claim 5, wherein the reviewer comprises a third person that did not participate in the contact.

10. The contact review service of claim 5, wherein the reviewer comprises a human worker of a human interaction task component.

11. The contact review service of claim 5, wherein the computing device is further operative to transmit a user interface to the at least one reviewer with the sampled contact, the user interface enabling the reviewer to employ another computing device to review a portion of the sampled contact.

12. The contact review service of claim 11, wherein the computing device is further operative to transmit to the reviewer a sample having a longer duration than a sample originally received by the reviewer.

13. The contact review service of claim 5, wherein the contact between the first person and the second person comprises one or more of telephone calls, electronic mail messages, short message service (SMS) messages, instant messages, and video messages.

14. A computer-implemented method of determining a quality of contact between a first person and a second person, the method comprising:

under control of one or more configured computer systems,

obtaining a record of a contact between the first person and the second person;

isolating the first person'"'"'s portion of the contact;

selecting the first person'"'"'s portion of the contact for further review;

providing the selected first person'"'"'s portion of the contact to a reviewer with instructions to determine the quality of contact between the first person and the second person; and

generating a final review based upon a response received from the reviewer.

15. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the selected first person'"'"'s portion of the contact comprises a selected duration at the end of the contact.

16. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the reviewer instructions comprise a scale by which the reviewer assesses the quality of the contact between the first person and the second person.

17. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the reviewer comprises a third person that did not participate in the contact.

18. The computer-implemented method claim 14, wherein the reviewer comprises a human worker of a human interaction task component.

19. The computer-implemented method of claim 14, wherein the contact between the first person and second person comprises one or more of telephone calls, electronic mail messages, short message service (SMS) messages, instant messages, and video messages.

20. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having encoded thereon instructions to coordinate contact between a first person and a second person, wherein the instructions, when executed by a computing apparatus, cause the computing apparatus to:

obtain a contact between the first person and the second person;

sample a selected duration of the contact;

transmit the sampled contact to at least one reviewer; and

generate a review of the sampled contact based upon responses received from the at least one reviewer regarding the quality of the selected contact.

21. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the instructions further cause the computing apparatus to isolate at least a portion of a contribution of the first person to the contact.

22. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 21, wherein the instructions further cause the computing apparatus to isolate at least the portion of the contribution of the first person to the contact by selecting a portion of the contact near an end region end of the contact.

23. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein a reviewer'"'"'s response regarding the quality of the selected contact comprises a characterization of the first person'"'"'s satisfaction contact with the second person on a selected scale.

24. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the reviewer comprises a person that did not participate in the contact.

25. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the reviewer comprises a human worker of a human interaction task component.

26. The non-transitory computer-readable storage medium of claim 20, wherein the contact between the first person and second person comprises one or more of telephone calls, electronic mail messages, short message service (SMS) messages, instant messages, and video messages.