Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Health care management
Reexamination Certificate
1999-11-17
2003-06-03
Hafiz, Tariq R. (Department: 3623)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Health care management
C705S007380, C705S002000, C705S034000, C705S038000, C705S040000, C379S265010, C379S265020, C379S265060
Reexamination Certificate
active
06574605
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to automated workload management systems and in particular to a computerized method and system for globally managing all categories of work by an organization across physically separated multiple locations.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Currently, the focus of an organization, such as a financial institution, for example, a bank, is to treat a request by one of its customers as a one time transactional event. The current customer support model is focused on supporting vertically aligned products and services, for example, credit cards versus bank accounts, along modes of customer contact, for example, ATM's and branches versus telephones, Internet and mail. More particularly, a single telephone command center located in one geographic area is used to attempt to coordinate all the telephone calls, such as all 800 service calls from all customers around the world. Such phone calls are distributed to service centers at other geographic locations, which is extremely time-consuming.
Furthermore, the customer service representatives or service professionals (SP's) at the service centers are not always available all of the time. For example, a particular SP may have to attend a meeting or a training session. Moreover, SP's may have to swap calls, depending on the different type of skill sets required for a customer calling in. For example, a customer might want to know about his or her current balance, or call in to increase his or her credit line or to respond to a bill collection issue or with a billing statement problem. It is necessary for those types of phone calls to be forwarded to different locations and different groups of SP's. Those types of problems are currently handled by a telephone command center in a single geographic location and all such problems are currently handled by human intervention.
In order to maximize the value of each customer contact to the financial institution and to furnish the financial institution the ability to manage the elements of the interaction with quality, consistency and efficiency, it is imperative for financial institutions to shift the focus to a model that leverages each customer contact. Thus, there is a need for a customer support model which reflects the customer's total value to the financial institution regardless of the mode of contact. In order to maximize the customer's value, the financial institution service model must be expanded to include customer sales support as well as efficient customer servicing. The actual access point the customer uses to enter the financial institution system should serve only to help qualify prioritization of the customer's request.
There is a further need for a computerized method and system of enterprise workload management which affords effective global management of all categories of work across multiple physically separated servicing locations that describes how work is initiated, regardless of service channel, and how work is identified, classified, tracked, managed, and processed, while simultaneously satisfying the financial institution's objectives, such as leveraging and selling, and achieving the maximum business volume at a minimum unit cost by prioritizing business objectives.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
It is a feature and advantage of the present invention to provide an automated method and system for enterprise workload management that enables an organization to route any channel service to any capable service site to support service location independence.
It is a further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that enables an organization to provide services to customers at any time and by any communications channel the customer chooses, wherein the enterprise workload management knows all work in process for a customer so that when a customer is identified, that customer will be routed to the first available agent that can best satisfy both the customer's intent and the organization's intent.
It is a still further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which supports unlimited geographical service centers with highly scaleable features to accommodate future growth.
It is another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which replaces manual procedures with automated management tools to maximize the central management control and to minimize the cost of operation.
It is an additional feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which maintains and monitors a service professional skill set and availability data at an enterprise level to support the dynamic resource allocation and workload assignment among geographic service centers.
It is also a feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which provides real time monitoring of service channel traffic, staffing activities, average speed of answer, and handle time categories at the enterprise, site, unit, and individual levels. This monitoring provides real-time event notification when threshold controls specified by the enterprise operations are exceeded, wherein such notification generates alerts that trigger dynamic resource reallocation and workload assignments among geographical service centers.
It is still another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which collects management information and performance measurement with MIS (management information systems) reporting capability to support the continuous improvement process.
It is a further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which supports accurate volume forecasting to avoid unnecessary resource reallocation by reducing forecast unit intervals.
It is a still further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which incorporates human behavior into the management process in matching the right skill to the right service channel, distributing the right amount of requested service to the right SP, switching an SP from one service job to another service job at the right frequency, and furnishing advance notice with time allowance for switching an SP from one service job to another service job.
It is an additional feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which retains historical data enterprise-wide to support planning and improvement processes.
It is still an additional feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system which supports a work item inventory mechanism to keep a record of a work item status from initiation to queuing, to active, to completion, and to ending with final storage in an enterprise archival system.
It is a still further feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that supports customer contact history as data for personalization of the customer's future contact in order to assure a quick response and quality service.
It is another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that supports dynamic reprioritization of work with response time as high priority to assure that the system will respond to customer requests in a timely fashion.
It is yet another feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system that supports a customizable rules engine to manage the definition of business policies for the workload distribution.
It is also a feature and advantage of the present invention to provide such a method and system with 24 hours a day and 7 days a week operation.
To achieve the stated and other features, advantages and objects, an embodiment of the present invention utilizes a management software or platform to automate service center coordination between a plurality of sites and to arrange distribution of resources. The resources are SP's a
Gau Jet
Robb Curtis
Sanders Barbara
Citibank N.A.
Hafiz Tariq R.
Jeanty Romain
Kilpatrick & Stockton LLP
Marcou George T.
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