Telephonic communications – With usage measurement – Call traffic recording or monitoring
Reexamination Certificate
1999-08-23
2004-04-06
Nguyen, Duc (Department: 2743)
Telephonic communications
With usage measurement
Call traffic recording or monitoring
C379S205010, C379S266100, C379S126000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06718022
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to the processing, storing and accessing of information within an information processing system. More particularly, the present invention relates to tracking and storing information about individual transactions for later report generation.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Modern enterprises require the ability to collect detailed information about day to day activity such as changes in inventory, transactions with customers, and number, length and origination location of telephone calls. Any information that would aid in operation of the enterprise or future planning for the enterprise may be collected. Typically, an enterprise such as a mail order retail business or a stock brokerage uses an information processing system that collects specified information, stores it in a database, and allows a user to selectively access and arrange (“slice and dice”) and retrieve the data.
One example of a commonly used information processing system is a system that processes transactions between the enterprise and those outside the enterprise. For example, various systems exist for receiving, routing, tracking and recording information about telephone calls to and from the enterprise. Particularly in the case of enterprises that do a significant amount of business by telephone with clients or customers, it is extremely useful to collect accurate information about customer telephone calls that can be easily and completely accessed at a later time and arranged into various report formats. As an example, a stock brokerage that takes orders by telephone would like to collect information about who a customer is, how much money the customer spends per time period, how long an average telephone call takes, how long a customer must wait to speak to an agent, how long an average telephone call lasts, what revenue an agent generates per time period, how many telephone calls an agent handles per time period, and so on.
Existing call processing systems typically receive calls coming into the enterprise and route them to various locations. An attempt is made to collect data about the calls, but data collection and storage capabilities of existing call processing systems have serious limitations. One limitation is the inability of the call processing system to store “call data” and “business data” related to a single call in one location where it can be easily accessed. This is because conventional call processing systems have limited ability to communicate with a computer terminal operated by a human agent taking a customer call. Typically, when a call is received by the system, the system routes the call to a human agent at a computer terminal, sometimes using information entered by the caller. The routed call is sent to the human agent and, simultaneously, the computer operated by the agent receives data from the system causing the computer to display relevant information to the agent, such as caller identity, caller buying history, etc. The agent conducts a business transaction with the caller, and at the end of the transaction, the agent is typically prompted by the computer to enter some “business data” about the transaction. The business data may include, for example, success, failure, revenue generated, stocks sold, etc. The business data is typically entered as a code or codes in predesignated fields of a record. The business data entered by the agent is typically written to a “local” database, for example, a storage device on the computer that the agent operates. “Call data”, which includes information such as the duration of the call, the origin of the call, etc., is typically stored by the call processing system at the termination of the call connection. The call data is usually stored by the call processing system in a database that is local to the call processing system but remote from the agent's computer. The call processing system typically stores information about calls to many different agents in different locations.
In such prior call processing systems it is difficult or impossible to later extract coherent information about the entire customer call that includes both the business data and the call data. One of the reasons for this is current limitations in the communication link between the call processing system and the agent's computer. One prior call processing system uses a computer telephony integration (CTI) link to transmit American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) messages between the call processing system and an agent computer. Typically, control messages handling the call are sent from the call processing system to the agent computer during the call. These messages may include messages to indicate call connection and termination, or messages that cause a screen pop application to bring up relevant information on the agent's computer screen when the call is connected. The CTI link may also be used to transmit data from the agent computer to the call processing system during the call. This data may include business data related to the call that is entered by the agent during the call. Usually limited fields exist for the entry of business data by the agent. One serious limitation of the current CTI link is that it is only open when the call is actually connected. Therefore, the call may be disconnected before an agent has time to enter information about the call and transmit the information to the call processing system.
Conventional call processing systems thus have the disadvantage of allowing limited business data to be entered only in a narrow time window. Conventional call processing systems are further subject to error on the part of the agent in entering business data.
In addition to these data collection limitations, conventional call processing systems typically do not store business data and call data together so that it may be easily accessed and associated with the proper call. Most business data is not transmitted from the agent computer to the call processing system, but is stored locally with respect to the agent computer, for example, in a storage device of the agent computer. Although prior systems have limited capability to store some business data and some call data while preserving the relationship of the data to the call, retrieval is usually cumbersome. For example, it is possible to provide for an indirect linkage of stored business data and stored call data for the same call by placing matching information in a predesignated field of a record in the system database (for the call data) and a predesignated field of a record in the database external to the system (for the business data). Retrieval of the data for the single call, however, requires lookups in two databases.
Existing call processing systems have additional disadvantages related to the way in which call data is collected and stored by the system for later analysis. A “call” is typically defined in a limited way that prevents complete records about a call from being collected. For example, in the case of a call that is transferred at least once after being initially received by the system, the call is typically defined as occurring between connection and disconnection, or hang up. This definition is not very accurate or useful, because the call may have included several segments during which different resources were connected, and involved several different agents and several different periods during which a calling customer was required to “hold”. It would be extremely useful to be able to identify each segment of a call and what happened during each segment in order to in order to better analyze customer needs and agent performance.
Conventional systems lack the capability of identifying every segment of a call as being part of a single call. One prior attempt to identify call segments uses a tracking number in a field of a call record. This method identifies some segments of a call, but not all possible segments of a call. As an example, when a call from a customer is connected to a first agent, a
Ehrlich Jason
Joyce Robert
Yu Steven Y.
Aspect Communications Corporation
Blakely , Sokoloff, Taylor & Zafman LLP
Nguyen Duc
LandOfFree
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