System and method for providing a social customer care system
The present invention relates to social customer service and support systems integrated with social media and social networks. More particularly, the invention provides a social customer care platform system to allow customer care functions, and in particular to allow customer service agents to identify, prioritize, match and triage customer support requests that may arise through a social network and may be serviced using a social network. It manages and tracks a high-volume of customer interactions and provides for monitoring of Internet social network posts relevant to a business's products or services along with the ability to capture, monitor, filter, make sense of and respond to, in near real-time, tens of thousands of social interactions. It comprises role specific user-interface and functionality for social customer service and support environments, automated prioritization and matching for increased agent productivity, and an automated enterprise workflow to align social media support with existing business processes.
1. A computer system comprising:
a processor;
a memory coupled to the processor;
a display device;
wherein the memory stores a program that provides a customer care system for requests from users arising on social media networks, when executed by the processor causes the processor to input into memory:
an enterprise workflow function that controls and coordinates the actions of the customer care system and its interaction with a user, wherein the enterprise workflow controls input to and output from external systems and data stores;
a customer response portal webpage function that allows the enterprise workflow to send a response to the user via the user's chosen social media network communication conduit;
an identity unification function that automatically locates, identifies and unifies user profiles across Internet-based social media networks websites;
a conversation consolidation function that automatically locates, identifies, consolidates and manages a user's public comments across Internet-based social media networks;
a peer-to-peer enterprise workflow function that controls and coordinates the actions of the customer care system and its interactions with user, wherein the peer-to-peer enterprise workflow function controls input to and output from external systems and data stores;
in response to a user issue raised by the user, the peer-to-peer enterprise workflow function searches social media networks for a resolution to the user issue;
a resolver matching function that automatically locates, identifies, consolidates and manages third party relevant social media network resolutions to the user issue across the social media networks and stores the relevant social media network resolutions;
the peer-to-peer enterprise workflow function receives the stored relevant social media network resolutions and sends the resolutions to the user issue to the user via the social media network without requiring agent-based support;
generate a response portal webpage identifier for the customer response portal webpage and a uniform resource locater associated with the response portal webpage identifier; and
capture survey answers from at least two sources;
i) at least one first answer that includes at least one hashtag from at least one social media interaction, and
ii) at least one second answer from follow-up social network responses as determined by utilizing a language clustering pattern function to infer language detected within a follow-up answer that falls within a satisfaction range found in the at least one first answer that include the at least one hashtag to compensate for the at least one second answer being unassociated with either the hashtag or the uniform resource locator; and
aggregate the captured survey answers from multiple communication channels and normalizing the aggregated contents of the survey answers to rate the resolution to the user issue.
2. The system of claim 1 further comprising a scoring algorithm for scoring user comments about a business's products based on context selected from the group consisting of user context, business context and industry context.
3. The system of claim 1 wherein the requests are selected from the group consisting of questions, comments, complaints and support service requests.
4. The system of claim 1 wherein the external systems and data stores are selected from the group consisting of: social media networks, on-line communities, support forums, knowledge-base services, customer support portals, and customer relationship management systems, public websites and market intelligence systems.
5. The system of claim 1 further comprising an automatically generated relevancy score for occurrences of user product comments posted on social media networks.
6. The system of claim 5 wherein the automatically generated relevancy score includes classifying and scoring for factors selected from the group consisting of user language, user sentiment, and user phrases.
7. The system of claim 5 wherein the automatically generated relevancy score comprises a program that when executed by the processor causes the processor to:
input into memory domain specific vocabulary terms relevant to a product;
based on relevancy of the user product comments, select the domain specific vocabulary terms most relevant to the product and create a tag; and
store the tags most relevant to the product in a data store.
8. The system of claim 1 further comprising using the user resolver matching function search social media networks for other users that have similar requests to the request from the user.
9. The system of claim 1 wherein the conversation consolidation function comprises a program that when executed by the processor causes the processor to:
input into memory a post created by a third party at the Internet-based social media network, the post having a web name of the third party;
determine if the third party's web name exists in a database accessible to the system; and
if there is an ongoing customer support conversation for the third party, attach the post to the ongoing conversation.
10. The system of claim 1 wherein the identity unification function comprises a program that when executed by the processor causes the processor to:
input a user profile for the user and designating the user as a search subject;
extract user-identifying attributes from the user profile;
search at least one of the Internet-based social media networks for a first third party having profiles containing attributes similar to the search subject user-identifying attributes;
identify a social media network site profile for the third party from the social media network based on a closeness of a match of the third party profile attributes and the search subject user-identifying attributes;
use the third party profile attributes and the user-identifying attributes and run a scoring algorithm to produce a first likelihood score that the third party and the user are the same person; and
if the likelihood score meets a certainty threshold criteria:
use the third party profile attributes and the user-identifying attributes to search additional Internet-based social media networks for attributes for a second third party that is similar to the third party profile attributes and the user-identifying attributes; and
based on a closeness of a match of the third party profile attributes and the search subject user-identifying attributes and the attributes for the second third party produce a second likelihood score that the second third party and the user are the same person.
11. The system of claim 1 wherein the portal webpage function comprises a program that when executed by the processor causes the processor to:
input into memory a user query, the query including the request from the user and a user Internet account;
select a communication channel and send a response to the user query using the selected communication channel;
store the response in a database accessible to the system and create a conversation identifier that identifies the user query;
communicate the uniform resource locator to the user via the selected communication channel; and
display the customer response portal webpage when the user accesses the uniform resource locator.