Group Contact Entity for Unified Customer Interaction Management
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current contact center solutions lack the ability to manage groups of individuals as a single contact entity, limiting efficient sales and service operations and requiring more resources to handle individual interactions within established groups.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that identify and aggregate contact information for groups, establishing temporary or permanent channels between the contact center and group members, allowing groups to be treated as a single contact entity for communication and service purposes, using Internet protocol-based infrastructure and software to manage groups dynamically.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If conventional contact center solutions treat only individual customers as single contacts, then individual contact management is simple and straightforward, but group relationship management is impossible and more resources are required to handle group interactions
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple individual contacts into a single group contact entity, allowing the contact center to manage groups of individuals as one unified contact. This consolidation enables efficient group relationship management while reducing the resources needed to handle group interactions, as the system can now aggregate and manage contacts at both individual and group levels simultaneously.
2Ease of operation
If groups of individuals are managed as separate individual contacts, then individual contact information is easily managed, but communication efficiency decreases and more contact center resources are consumed
Solution Approach 1:
The system combines multiple individual contact records into a single group contact entity that maintains links to all member contacts. This allows the contact center to communicate with entire groups through a single interface while still preserving individual contact information, thereby improving communication efficiency without sacrificing ease of contact management.
Solution Approach 2:
The group contact entity serves multiple functions simultaneously: it acts as a single communication target for group-wide messages, maintains individual contact details for all members, enables selective communication with subsets of members, and provides aggregated analytics. This multi-functionality resolves the contradiction by making the group contact structure versatile enough to handle both individual and group management needs.
3Adaptability or versatility
If existing group communication applications like PhoneTree and GroupMe are used, then group communication is enabled, but these solutions only reach individual members and cannot treat groups as single managed contacts
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a group contact entity as an intermediary layer between the contact center system and individual group members. This intermediary structure allows the contact center to treat groups as single managed contacts while maintaining the ability to communicate with individual members when needed, effectively bridging the gap between group-level and individual-level communication capabilities without requiring separate applications.
Data Source
AI summary
A method for establishing a group of individuals as a single contact entity eligible for contact services within a contact center includes the steps (a) identifying a group and each group member according to existing group rules and member profiles; (b) identifying and quantifying the unifying aspects of the members in the group; (c) aggregating the contact information for each group member relative to communications channels common to the group members and to the contact center; and (d) establishing one or more temporary and or permanent group channels between the contact center and the group members.