Verizon Corporate Services Group Inc.

Raytheon Bbn Technologies Corp.

Bbnt Solutions Llc.

Intrado Corporation

Other

Patrick Peterson

Bernhard Suhm

Sarah Lynn Hagan

Laura Jill Kleiman

Marie Wenzel Meteer

Daniel Joseph McCarthy

Michael Roberts

Katherine Godfrey

Patrick McHugh

Peter Dick

Joshua Bers

William Benjamin Russell

Lawrence Richard Smith

Barbara Freeman

Yvette Tenney

Michael Thome

Michael Decerbo

John A Golden

The location of voice prompts within a call waveform is usually conducted by match filtering a snippet of the prompt (approx. 800 ms) to the call waveform. In an enhanced process that can accommodate transmission errors when detecting voice prompts on lower quality transmission lines, a snippet of a voice prompt may be divided into sniplets, typically 100 ms long. The sniplets can be individually detected. If a sufficient number of sniplets are detected within allowed time tolerances, then this subset of detected sniplets can indicate the presence of the snippet, and thus the associated voice prompt.

Time tolerant prompt detection

Prompt snippets (typically 800 ms long) that are used to detect voice prompts within a call waveform may be divided into smaller sniplet portions (approx. 100 ms) long. The presence of a prompt in a call waveform may be detected by detecting the sniplets and determining if a sufficient number of the sniplets of a snippet were detected in sequence and within allowable time constraints. The use of sniplets improves accuracy of prompt detection in call waveforms in lower quality transmissions.

Prompt detection by dividing waveform snippets into smaller snipplet portions

A contact center analysis system can receive various types of communications from customers, such as audio from telephone calls, voicemails, or video conferences; text from speech-to-text translations, emails, live chat transcripts, text messages, and the like; and other media or multimedia. The system can segment the communication data using temporal, lexical, semantic, syntactic, prosodic, user, and/or other features of the segments. The system can cluster the segments according to one or more similarity measures of the segments. The system can use the clusters to train a machine learning classifier to identify one or more of the clusters as waypoints (e.g., portions of the communications of particular relevance to a user training the classifier). The system can automatically classify new communications using the classifier and facilitate various analyses of the communications using the waypoints.

Waypoint detection for a contact center analysis system

To enable analysis of the performance of a customer contact center handling interactions across multiple types of communication channels, a system is provided that collects and analyzes data across the multiple channels and allows a user, such as an analyst, to analyze customer journeys that comprise multiple interactions, or contacts, across multiple communication channel types. That analysis can be used to identify journeys with similar, perhaps problematic, characteristics and provide the analyst user with the ability to examine the collected data for each identified journey individually. Once a journey is selected, the system displays the collected data in a coordinated display of journey timeline, text history, and sequence of automatically detected significant events. This single-journey display, applied to multiple journeys in succession, allows the analyst to explicitly annotate problems or formulate hypotheses about problems that can then be quantified for impact by refining the initial multi-journey analysis.

Presenting multiple customer contact channels in a browseable interface

Systems and methods that analyze and monitor the performance of a call center including performance of the interactive voice response systems, call center agents, and other components. The systems and methods record characteristics of the call such as the audio data, and analyze that record to identify the events that take place during the call. These events may be defined as 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, that may be monitored by the systems described herein. The data collected about these events and metrics may be stored in a database and provided to the 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.

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

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. A call center administrator may also identify a set of metrics, such as the number of dropped calls that occur during a day 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.

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.

A system permits a customer service agent to receive and listen to an audio recording from a caller on a voice device (), and thereby prepare to support the caller before connecting directly with him/her. The incoming call may originate on a public telephone network (), and be received by a system (). The system () may include one or more of an automatic call distributor/private branch exchange (), a voice response unit (), and a computer telephone integration server (), and possibly a data device (). The caller may be prompted to provide an audio message concerning the nature of the telephone call. Before being connected to the caller, the service agent may be provided with the audio message from the caller, possibly via the data device (). After listening to the caller's previously recorded audio message and preparing to assist the caller, the agent and caller may then be directly connected together.

Systems and methods for providing audio information to service agents

A system for visually representing user behavior within an interactive voice response (IVR) system of a call processing center generates a complete sequence of events within the IVR system for plural calls to the call processing center, the plurality of calls being recorded from end to end. A call flow of the IVR system is modeled as a non-deterministic finite-state machine, such that a start state of the finite-state machine represents a first prompt of the IVR system, other states of the finite-state machine represent subsequent prompts at which a branching occurs in the call flow of the IVR system, exit conditions are represented as end states, and transitions of the finite-state machine represent transitions between call flow states triggered by data inputted by a user or by internal processing of the IVR system. The complete sequences of events for the plural calls are provided to the finite-state machine to produce a two-way matrix of several counters. The data from the two-way matrix is represented as a state-transition diagram.

Apparatus and method for visually representing behavior of a user of an automated response system

An apparatus and method for monitoring the performance of an interactive voice response (IVR) system used by an automated call processing center generates logs of call activity, determines routing information from the logs, notes predetermined significant activity in agent-caller dialog portions of calls routed to an agent in the logs, and determines at least one quantity correlated to a true intention of callers. A performance model of the IVR system is generated from the logs. The logs, the routing information, the quantity correlated to the true intention of the callers, and the performance model are analyzed to determine a performance value of the IVR system, which is used to monitor the IVR system.

Apparatus and method for monitoring performance of an automated response system

An observation system for observation calls to a call center includes an automatic call director (ACD) unit, an interactive voice response (IVR) unit, and a recorder unit. The ACD receives incoming calls to the call center and also queues and switches the calls to various lines of the call center. The IVR unit is connected to the ACD unit and interacts with a caller via an interactive computer program in which the caller enters a response to a prompt and the response causes the interactive program to provide the caller with information or another prompt. The recorder unit records calls to the call center from beginning to end, including prompts made by the IVR unit, callers responses to the prompts, and information provided by the IVR unit to the callers.

System and method for observing calls to a call center

A system for visually representing call events in calls handled by an automated response system of a call processing center uses a recording of calls recorded from end to end. Events of interest that occurred during a recorded call are annotated and time stamped, and a call type of the call is determined. Time stamp data for predetermined significant events of the annotated events of interest is segregated, with the time stamp data providing timings for the predetermined significant events. The timings are tabulated by call type and bar graphs are prepared to illustrate the timings of the predetermined significant events for each call type.

Apparatus and method for visually representing events in calls handled by an automated response system

A system for assessing an automated call routing system's performance is structured to present a caller calling into the automated call routing system with a call that includes an interactive voice response (IVR) portion and, at an option of the caller, an caller/agent dialog portion. The system operates to monitor calls coming into the automated call routing system and to record end-to-end calls from among the calls coming into the automated call routing system. A sequence of events for the recorded calls is transcribed, including events occurring in the IVR portion and in the caller/agent dialog portion, to identify predetermined call events of interest. The transcribed calls are analyzed to infer a complete event sequence of each of the recorded calls. From the analysis, parameters are calculated corresponding to cost effectiveness and usability of the automated call routing system, based at least in part upon information obtained by the caller during the IVR portion.

System and method for assessing a call center

An apparatus for logging events that occur during a call to a call center includes an analysis unit and a memory unit. The analysis unit analyzes a recording of a complete call to the call center. The memory unit automatically records, in an event log, information about events that occurred during an interaction between the caller and an interactive voice response (IVR) program of an IVR system of the call center. The analysis unit is programmed with the IVR program's call flow, such that all possible paths the caller may take while interacting with the IVR program are known by the analysis unit. The event log logs events in sequential order and includes data on at least one of the following: a prompt made by the IVR system to the caller, a touch-tone entry made by the caller in response to the prompt, a verbal answer spoken by the caller in response to the prompt, a period of silence, termination of the call by the caller, and transfer of the call to a live agent.

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Patrick Peterson