This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/174,961, filed on Jan. 7, 2000. The present invention relates generally to customer communication services. More particularly, the invention is a system and method for managing and integrating multimedia customer and customer-client interactions.
Customer communication services have traditionally involved using call center technology to allow customers to contact a service agent via a telephone or for allowing agents, such as telemarketers, to contact customers. A call center is a central place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by a service organization, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a call center has the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen calls and forward them to someone qualified to handle them, and to log calls. Call centers are used by mail-order catalog organizations, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, and any large organization that uses multiple telephones to sell or service products and services.
Some companies have a network of geographically distributed call centers for serving customer's needs. Such distributed call centers often provide redundancy and decentralization.
In a call center, agents handle telephone communications with callers. Each agent is typically assigned to a telephone connected to a central switch, which is in turn connected to a public switched telephone network (PSTN). The central switch may be one of several types such as an telephony switching apparatus (TSA), private branch exchange (PBX), or PSTN. If the call center consists of just a central switch and the telephones connected to it, the routing capabilities are limited. There may also be limits in the range of computer processes that may be performed.
To achieve greater computerization of call centers, advances have been made in the use of computers to manage telephone calls, known as computer telephone integration (CTI). CTI is used to describe the computerized services of call centers such as those that direct a phone call to the right department at a business that is being called. It is also sometimes used to describe the ability to use a personal computer to initiate and manage phone calls. CTI applications provide the ability to do one or more of the following:                Authenticate callers. Using one of several standard methods, the telephone number of the caller can be screened against a database,        Recognize a voice, either for authentication or for system commands, such as digit recognition,        Determine how to process a call (for example, by forwarding it to the appropriate person or department) using live, recorded voice, or touch-tone entered input,        Provide interactive voice response (IVR) to callers,        Match the number of a caller with a customer record and display it for reference when talking to the caller,        Manage voice or video conferences,        Collect and display pending live calls or messages that have been left by callers,        Receive fax messages and route them to appropriate fax machines,        Pre-dial callers for outbound calling such as telemarketing,        Initiate a smart agent application to provide help with the caller's request based on call input.        
When calls are received at a CTI call center, they are placed into a queue until an agent is available to take the call. In the CTI call center, typically an agent using a telephone station connected to the central switch also has access to a computer terminal. The central switch may consist of hardware and software that control a call from the time it arrives until the service agent answers it. The central switch provides the interface with the customer (allowing the customer to hear messages and music, etc.) and may also perform other functions such as gathering information about the call and the customer before routing the call to an available service agent. The Telephony Switching Apparatus (TSA) software routes the call to a knowledgeable and available service agent using knowledge obtained about the caller and the caller's needs.
In addition to using the medium of voice, other media are used to attempt to efficiently handle the large volume of customer contacts processed by a call center and to improve caller customer service. Other media include chat, voice mail messages, electronic mail, facsimile messages and video messages. The agent's computer terminal may be used to access databases of stored data and information about the call and caller may also be displayed on the computer screen for the agent. The computer terminal may be interconnected by a network to a server, which contains the CTI software.
However, many of these other media are not integrated into the call center processing. There is often no way to track the performance of the call center for some or all of the media. Usually, the call center system does not capture and process these different communication media seamlessly and simultaneously. The result is that the service agent does not have an integrated communication interface with the caller which can result in a slower and less than satisfactory processing of the call.