Predictive routing
AssigneeDirectly, Inc.
InventorsEUGENE MANDEL, JEFF PATTERSON
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
In a crowd sourcing approach, responses to customer service inquiries are provided by routing a subset of the inquiries town independent group of experts. The customer service inquiries are optionally routed to specific experts based on matches between identified subject matter of the inquiries and expertise of the experts. Embodiments include an Al based system configured to determine which of the inquiries should be routed to the independent group of experts. The expert system is optionally trained based on scored responses to prior customer service inquiries.
Claims26
An expert management system configured to manage customer service inquiries, the system comprising:
- a request I/O configured to receive a stream of customer service inquiries;
- an inquiry parser configured to determine one or more topic characteristics of each of the customer service inquiries;
- status logic configured to monitor statuses of a plurality of experts;
- expert data storage configured to store data characterizing one or more specialty characteristics of each of the plurality of experts;
- acceptance logic configured to accept a subset of the inquires for processing by a first human expert, the acceptance being based on availability of the first human expert and predicted probabilities that the first human expert will be able to resolve each member of the subset of inquiries, the first human expert being a member of the plurality of experts;
- and
- routing logic configured to route the subset of inquiries to the first human expert.
An expert management system configured to manage customer service inquiries, the system comprising:
- a request I/O configured to receive a stream of customer service inquiries;
- an inquiry parser configured to determine one or more topic characteristics of each of the inquiries;
- status logic configured to monitor statuses of a plurality of human experts;
- expert data storage configured to store data characterizing one or more specialty characteristics of each member of the plurality of experts;
- acceptance logic configured to estimate probabilities that at least one human expert or an automated response will be able to resolve each of the customer service inquiries, and configured to accept a subset of the inquires for processing based on the estimated probabilities, at least one probability being calculated for each of the customer service inquiries;
- and
- routing logic configured to route the inquiry to the at least one human expert or automated response logic.
A method of processing a customer service inquiry, the method comprising:
- monitoring status of a plurality of experts;
- receiving a stream of customer service inquiries;
- parsing each of the customer service inquiries to determine one or more topic characteristics of each of the customer service inquiries;
- retrieving specialty characteristics of each of the plurality of experts from a data storage;
- calculating a probability that each of the plurality of experts can resolve each of the customer service inquiries, the calculation being based on the topic characteristics of each inquiry and the specialty characteristics of each of the plurality of experts;
- accepting a subset of the plurality of inquiries by comparing 1) a threshold and 2) the calculated probability of each inquiry being resolved by a human expert, the human expert being a member of the plurality of experts;
- and
- routing each member of the subset to at least one member of the plurality of experts.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.