Call centers have become a key channel for managing corporation-customer relations. A call center allows for both service and support, as well as for the selling and marketing of the corporate products. Products adapted for use in call centers have become an industry, relying on hardware, such as switch boxes and telephone-computer interfaces, as well as software for managing the interactions between an agent and a customer, e.g. the Customer Relation Management (CRM) software application. The agents in call centers are trained to handle as many calls as possible, while reflecting during a call the corporate goals in terms of product or service quality, needs, standards, and customer understanding. Since a call center is often a large operation, often manned by a large management chain and sometimes operated by a subcontractor, modifying the agents' behavior is a complex and sensitive task: the call center is often perceived as a reflection of the capabilities of a corporation. The currently employed methods to ensure and to improve the performance of an agent rely mostly on recording the conversation for later analysis, or allowing the supervisor to tap into the call in real-time.
In order to evaluate an agent, a Quality Monitoring (QM) team member or supervisor listens to a recording and fills a form. The forms are then analyzed and stored in a QM database. A portion of an exemplary prior art QM system questionnaire is shown in FIG. 1.
Agent performance analysis is also performed in prior art systems by converting the conversation of a call into textual data, and reviewing the converted textual data to determine the occurrence of undesirable categorization, word-spotting, emotional outbursts, or talk patterns. A detailed evaluation form is then filled and stored in a database.
In prior art QM systems, the data stored in the database may be processed in various ways, such as by generating reports per agent, sending update e-mails to management and to agents, and developing a customized training program for overcoming various weak points that were determined in the agent's performance. Thus the processed data provides a feedback to the agent and to his managers. However, the feedback does not have a sufficiently quick response time to influence the performance of an agent in the next call that the agent is conducting. The feedback from QM data spurs a long term educational process by which the agent's call center performance is improved, involving the understanding of points raised in the report sent to the agent and the implementation of these points by practical training, such as by a training seminar conducting by representatives of the organization. Improvement to the performance of the agent invariably cannot be realized in a subsequent call, and cannot be realized as soon as a performance deficiency is detected.
It is an object of the present invention to provide feedback of a sufficiently fast response time from a quality monitoring system to allow the performance of a call center agent to improve at the next call-related occurrence at which the agent encounters the same situation which previously caused a performance deficiency.
It is an additional object of the present invention to augment a quality monitoring system so that the performance of a call center agent will be improved in real-time, during the course of a call conducted with a customer.
It is an additional object of the present invention to provide a proactive quality monitoring system for generating corrective and preventive actions to be taken by a call center agent in real-time, during the course of a call conducted with a customer.
It is an additional object of the present invention to provide a proactive quality monitoring system by which the agent performance in terms of customer retention can be improved.
It is yet an additional object of the present invention to personalize a CRM system per agent using feedback data received from a quality monitoring system.
It is yet an additional object of the present invention to personalize the CRM system per agent using feedback data received from a quality monitoring system in real time and which is dynamically adjusted in response to the performance of the agent.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent as the description proceeds.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds