Unified Customer Care Inquiry Queue for Cross-Media Performance Measurement
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing communication networks face challenges in consistently measuring and tracking customer care agent response performance across different media types, such as voice calls, emails, and instant messages, as existing methods lack a unified approach to integrate inquiries and set performance metrics.
Innovation Solution
Integrating customer care inquiries across multiple media types into a single queue, allowing for time-stamped and prioritized handling, with configurable response and resolution targets, and triggering alarms when thresholds are exceeded.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If customer care inquiries from multiple media types are handled separately, then each media type can be managed with its own specific process, but it becomes difficult to uniformly measure and track response performance across different media types
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges inquiries from multiple media types (voice calls, emails, instant messages, etc.) into a single unified queue structure. This allows consistent time-stamping and uniform performance measurement across all media types while maintaining the ability to track individual media type metrics. The unified queue eliminates the need for separate measurement systems for each media type.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a universal queue structure that can handle multiple media types simultaneously with a single system. The queue is designed to accommodate different inquiry types while applying consistent time-stamping and performance tracking mechanisms, making the system multi-functional rather than requiring separate specialized systems for each media type.
2Measurement precision
If a unified queue is implemented to measure response performance consistently, then response time can be uniformly tracked across media types, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary time-stamping to inquiries when they enter the unified queue, recording both arrival time and resolution time. This pre-established time-tracking infrastructure enables uniform response performance measurement without requiring complex post-processing or separate measurement systems for each media type.
Solution Approach 2:
The unified queue structure acts as an intermediary between multiple media types and the performance measurement system. It standardizes different inquiry formats into a common structure with consistent time-stamping fields, simplifying the measurement process while maintaining the ability to track performance across diverse media types.
3Productivity
If response time targets are set for customer care agents, then service quality can be improved, but agents may experience increased stress and workload pressure
Solution Approach 1:
The patent allows configuration of different response time targets specific to each media type (voice calls, emails, instant messages) and individual queue thresholds. This localized approach enables optimized performance expectations for each media type based on its characteristics, rather than imposing uniform stress-inducing targets across all inquiry types.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements monitoring and notification mechanisms that provide feedback to agents and supervisors about response time performance. When thresholds are approached or exceeded, notifications are generated, enabling proactive management of workload and response times, rather than relying solely on punitive target enforcement.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and apparatus for integrating queries across different media types so that the response time performance of a customer care agent, such as time to respond and/or time to repair can be uniformly measured are disclosed. The present method can provide configurable time to respond and time to repair targets on a per media type basis or on a per queue basis across all different media types. Individual media type and/or queue thresholds can be set and alarms and notifications can be triggered when customer care agents exceed these thresholds.