US20110125580A1 - Method for discovering customers to fill available enterprise resources - Google Patents
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- US20110125580A1 US20110125580A1 US12/762,856 US76285610A US2011125580A1 US 20110125580 A1 US20110125580 A1 US 20110125580A1 US 76285610 A US76285610 A US 76285610A US 2011125580 A1 US2011125580 A1 US 2011125580A1
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- G06Q50/00—Systems or methods specially adapted for specific business sectors, e.g. utilities or tourism
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Definitions
- Contact centers generally exchange information with consumers through directed contacts. Directed contacts consist of emails, phone calls, or other forms of communication that are directed to the contact center or the consumer. However, many people today, exchange information or interact through non-direct methods. Non-direct communications require users to post communications to third party sites or forums, but not to direct those communications to a specific person or organization. Non-direct communication methods include social media, which may include websites, networks, blogs, micro-blogs, RSS feeds, social media websites (such as, Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.), and other types of social media. Generally, it is not possible for contact centers to communicate with consumers through non-direct methods. As such, the contact centers may be unable to interact with consumers that use social media to offer certain types of customer service.
- Enterprises often have products to sell to customers. Some of these products may have a short shelf life or have a certain date upon which they need to be sold. Examples of such type of products may be fruits and vegetables, airline tickets, concert tickets, or other types of goods. Enterprises are often left with excess products or services in which they want to provide to willing customers. However, enterprises currently don't have a good ability to find these customers who may be willing to buy these products or services or contact them if they can locate the customers.
- Methods and systems described herein provide a contact center which can locate customers that may be willing to buy goods or services, wherein those goods or services may have shelve lives or pending disposal dates.
- a profile for a customer is created in a dialog script.
- Social media messages are analyzed based on the profile to determine if the customer may be of a type that would be willing to buy a certain product. If the customer is such a type that may be willing to buy the product, the contact center can contact the social media user and offer the product or service to that customer.
- the enterprises receive a service that quickly locates customers that may be willing to buy products and allows the enterprise to dispose of the products that have certain shelf lives.
- the system can have a dialog creator which receives inputs from the user about what type of customers to contact. These user inputs are stored in a dialog data structure.
- the dialog data structure may then be retrieved by a dialog system, which uses the dialog script to determine customers the enterprise wishes to contact. Upon finding these customers, a communication stored in the dialog script can be sent to the customer to engage them in a contact and offer them goods or services.
- a social media gateway can be used gather information on specific social network users.
- data may be collected about the user that may exist on public blogs, wilds, etc.
- data sources with public information e.g., census, zillow.com, etc., may be used to gather more background user information.
- a business may identify that the business has some excess capacity, over-stocked inventory, or excess service capacity.
- the full extent of the excess capacity can be identified in terms of how much inventory available, price levels, time to use, time to expire, or any other distinguishing characteristics.
- the business can create or identify a previously developed automated “marketing” campaign.
- the campaign can be included in a dialog data structure that can be executed by the social media contact center.
- the campaign may utilize automated and, possibly, agent resources to contact identified consumers and quickly sell the excess-capacity resources.
- the campaign can consist of several steps to identify potential consumers.
- the system can first identify recent discussions on social network sites and those consumers that have a social network relationship with the enterprise who have had “relevant” conversations about the available resource. For example, if United Airlines has extra seats to Paris later this week, then all users who have discussed travel to Europe can be identified.
- the campaign uses any number of text analysis methods to further qualify the potential of the customer based on their recent social media interactions.
- the customer is also analyzed for potential value based on their demographic data, location, historical purchases, CRM data, or any other information known about the customer. This evaluation may be done through the automated system or by utilizing agents for human analysis.
- a contact can be made from the business to the customer.
- An agent may reach out directly to the customer.
- An automated system may reach out to the customer.
- the customer may be reached through a different channel than that of the initial communication.
- the initial communication with the customer may be the first attempt to offer the resource to the customer and may include follow-up contact instructions for the user to accept the offer.
- a key component of the campaign is that the campaign can run for a specified duration. If a resource is set to expire on Friday, the campaign may monitor and run starting on Tuesday for three days or until the resource capacity is met.
- Flowers.com may have over stocked a specific flower arrangement.
- Flowers.com starts a campaign using the described system. Since time is short (because the flower arrangement will wilt and die), Flowers.com searches for users over the next few days who discuss special events, such as, birthdays, anniversaries, new job, etc., on any social media network.
- the automated campaign identifies the potential customers and begins sending out messages or posts either to the social media network or to other communication channels with links to reach an agent to purchase the flower arrangement.
- United Airlines may have available seats to Paris on Friday. Existing methods of discounting seats may not have filled the seats. As such, United Airlines start a campaign using the described system to identify all people discussing travel and Europe. Over the next few days the automated systems sends out special deals to the selected high value customers. The deal includes a link to a direct agent chat for quick turn-around of the special offer.
- a local electronics dealer has 20 HDTVs that are being discontinued and replaced with a newer model.
- a shipment of the newer model HDTVs is due to arrive soon, and the dealer must sell the 20 older model HDTVS fast.
- the electronics dealer can create the outbound campaign to identify potential customers that are in the local geographic area and may be able to purchase in the next day or two. In this situation, the location and demographics of the customers is important.
- the system searches and monitors those discussing, not just TVs, but movies, sports, video games, etc.; thus, the system finds those customers that may be interested in obtaining one of the closeout items.
- each of the expressions “at least one of A, B and C”, “at least one of A, B, or C”, “one or more of A, B, and C”, “one or more of A, B, or C” and “A, B, and/or C” means A alone, B alone, C alone, A and B together, A and C together, B and C together, or A, B and C together.
- automated refers to any process or operation done without material human input when the process or operation is performed. However, a process or operation can be automatic, even though performance of the process or operation uses material or immaterial human input, if the input is received before performance of the process or operation. Human input is deemed to be material if such input influences how the process or operation will be performed. Human input that consents to the performance of the process or operation is not deemed to be “material”.
- Non-volatile media includes, for example, NVRAM, or magnetic or optical disks.
- Volatile media includes dynamic memory, such as main memory.
- Computer-readable media include, for example, a floppy disk, a flexible disk, hard disk, magnetic tape, or any other magnetic medium, magneto-optical medium, a CD-ROM, any other optical medium, punch cards, paper tape, any other physical medium with patterns of holes, a RAM, a PROM, and EPROM, a FLASH-EPROM, a solid state medium like a memory card, any other memory chip or cartridge, or any other medium from which a computer can read.
- the computer-readable media is configured as a database, it is to be understood that the database may be any type of database, such as relational, hierarchical, object-oriented, and/or the like. Accordingly, the invention is considered to include a tangible storage medium and prior art-recognized equivalents and successor media, in which the software implementations of the present invention are stored.
- module refers to any known or later developed hardware, software, firmware, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, or combination of hardware and software that is capable of performing the functionality associated with that element. Also, while the invention is described in terms of exemplary embodiments, it should be appreciated that individual aspects of the invention can be separately claimed.
- An “advertising campaign” as used herein is any indirect or direct effort to entice a consumer to buy a product or service.
- FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a communication system operable to interact with persons using a social media network
- FIG. 2A is a block diagram of an embodiment of a social media gateway
- FIG. 2B is a block diagram of an embodiment of a dialog system
- FIG. 3 is a block diagram of embodiments of a dialog data structure
- FIG. 4 is a flow diagram of an embodiment of a process for creating a dialog data structure that can be used to direct a campaign
- FIG. 5 is a flow diagram of an embodiment a process for finding customers that may be willing to buy excess-capacity goods or services;
- FIG. 6 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a computing environment
- FIG. 7 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a computer system.
- the communication system 100 can include a contact center 102 , a network 108 , and one or more types of social media networks or systems, such as social media network 1 112 , social media network 2 114 , and/or social media network 3 116 .
- Social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 can be any social media including, but not limited to, networks, websites, or computer enabled systems.
- a social media network may be MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, Spoke, or other similar computer enabled systems or websites.
- the communication system 100 can communicate with more or fewer social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 than those shown FIG. 1 , as represented by ellipses 118 .
- the network 108 can be any network or system operable to allow communication between the contact center 102 and the one or more social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the network 108 can represent any communication system, whether wired or wireless, using any protocol and/or format.
- the network 108 provides communication capability for the contact center 102 to communicate with websites or systems corresponding to the one or more social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the network 108 can represent two or more networks, where each network is a different communication system using different communication protocols and/or formats and/or different hardware and software.
- network 108 can be a wide area network, local area network, the Internet, a cellular telephone network, or some other type of communication system.
- the network 108 may be as described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 .
- a contact center 102 can be a system that can communicate with one or more persons that use social media networking sites 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the contact center 102 can be hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software.
- the contact center 102 can be executed by one or more servers or computer systems, as described in conjunction with FIGS. 8 and 9 .
- the contact center 102 can include all systems, whether hardware or software, that allow the contact center 102 to receive, service, and respond to directed and non-directed contacts.
- the contact center 102 can include the telephone or email system, an interface to human agents, systems to allow human agents to service and respond to received contacts, and one or more systems operable to analyze and improve the function of agent interaction.
- the contact center 102 may include a dialog system 104 and a social media gateway 106 . While the dialog system 104 and the social media gateway 106 are shown as being a part of the contact system 102 , in other embodiments, the dialog system 104 and/or the social media gateway 106 are separate systems or functions executed separately from the contact center 102 and/or executed by a third party.
- the dialog system 104 may process and receive messages.
- the social media gateway 106 can receive and translate messages from the one or more social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- An embodiment of the dialog system 104 is described in conjunction with FIG. 2B .
- An embodiment of the social media gateway 106 is described in conjunction with FIG. 2A .
- the contact center 102 may also communicate with one or more communication devices 110 .
- the communication devices 110 can represent a customer's or user's cell phone, email system, personal digital assistant, laptop computer, or other device that allows the contact center 102 to interact with the customer.
- the contact center 102 can modify a non-direct contact, from a social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 , into a directed contact by sending a response message directly to a customer's communication device 110 .
- the social media gateway 106 can include one or more components which may include hardware, software, or combination of hardware and software.
- the social media gateway 106 can be executed by a computer system, such as those described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 .
- the components described in conjunction with FIG. 2A are logic circuits or other specially-designed hardware that are embodied in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or other hardware.
- FPGA field programmable gate array
- ASIC application specific integrated circuit
- the social media gateway 106 can include one or more content filters 202 a , 202 b , and/or 202 c .
- a content filter 202 can receive all of the messages for the contact center 102 from a social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 and eliminate or delete those messages that do not require a response. For example, a message between two friends on a Facebook page, if not pertaining to a product or a service of the company operating the contact center 102 , may not need a response.
- the content filter 202 can filter out or delete the non-suitable message from the messages that are received by the social media network application programming interface (API) 1 204 a , social media network API 2 204 b , and/or social media network API 3 204 c .
- the social media network API 204 only needs to translate those messages that should be received by the dialog system 104 . Translation typically requires the conversion of the message into a different format.
- the content filter 202 is provided with one or more heuristics for filter rules from a filter database (not shown). These filter rules can be created by the external customer or internal user (e.g. agent or administrator) of the communication system 100 . Thus, the user or customer of the communication system 100 can customize the filtering of messages from social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 . Further, different rules may be applied to different social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 , as some social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 may have different types of messages or postings than other types of social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the content filter 202 is shown as part of the social media gateway 106 , it is to be appreciated that the content filter 202 may be a part of the social media network API 204 .
- the content filter 202 may correspond to query terms used by the social media network API 204 .
- the content filter 202 or query terms are an argument to the social media network API 204 call.
- the social media network API 204 can be an application that the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 provides to access the site. Thus, the social media network API 204 is called and connects to the social media gateway 106 and to the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- Any suitable filter criteria may be employed for social media API 209 . Examples of filter criteria include positive content of the source of posting, an address field, destination or recipient address fields, a time stamp field, a subject matter field, and a message body field.
- a type of searchable content can be name of the business enterprise running or employing the contact center 102 and/or the products or services of the enterprise.
- the social media gateway 106 can include one or more social media network APIs 204 . As shown in FIG. 2A , the social media gateway 106 may include a social media network API 204 for each social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 . As such, the social media gateway 106 can interact with each social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 in the particular (often unique) format or protocol used by the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 . Further, when new social media networks are created, the social media gateway 106 can be easily expanded to interact with those social media networks by adding another social media network API 204 . Where social media networks 112 are more standardized, or use substantially similar formats or protocols, a single social media network API can be shared by multiple social media networks 112 - 116 .
- the social media network API 204 can receive messages from and send messages to the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the social media network API 204 can translate a message received from a social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 and send the translated message to a message filter 206 .
- the social media network API 204 can translate the received message into a standard formatted file.
- the translated message may be represented by an extensible mark-up language (XML) file or other file having a general format.
- XML extensible mark-up language
- the social media network API 204 can receive a generally or standard format response message, from the dialog system 104 , and translate that response into a particularly or specifically formatted response message that can be posted to the corresponding social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- Messages to the contact center 102 are addressed to the contact center 102 .
- a customer may become a “friend” of the contact center 102 on a social media network 114 , such as Facebook.
- the customer may then address a message to the contact center 102 on Facebook.
- This non-direct contact is a message that is not sent directly to the contact center 102 but to the contact center's Facebook page.
- the contact center 102 receives messages not addressed to the contact center 102 .
- the contact center 102 can receive tweets from Twitter that are “broadcast” rather than addressed to the contact center 102 .
- the contact center 102 may also search for messages or content on the social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- Exemplary search criteria include customer name, customer profession, customer home address, customer business address, customer employer name, customer educational or professional background, customer hobby, personal or business interests, customer family profile, and the like.
- the social media gateway 106 of the contact center 102 can query, gather, or connect to a live feed of data from a social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 and then apply a filter to the indirect information.
- the translated messages from the social media network API 204 can be received by a message filter 206 .
- a message filter 206 can perform some or all of the functions of the content filter 202 and eliminate messages before being sent to the dialog system 104 .
- the message filter 206 eliminates information from within the messages before the redacted messages are sent to the dialog system 104 .
- a message from a social media network 112 may have three or four interactions between two parties not associated with the contact center 102 . Only one of the several postings may be pertinent to the dialog system 104 .
- the message filter 206 can eliminate or delete at least a portion of the other messages for the dialog system 104 .
- the dialog system 104 receives a message where some of the content of the message has been deleted.
- the message filter 206 can retrieve heuristics or filter rules from a filter database (not shown), similar to the content filter 202 .
- a substantial difference between the content and message filters 202 and 206 is that the content filter 202 is specific to a particular message format associated with a corresponding social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 , while the message filter 206 is applied to a standardized or universal format and is therefore common to multiple social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- One skilled in the art will understand the type of rules that may be used to filter information from messages such that only pertinent questions, facts, requests, or information is sent to the dialog system 104 .
- a message aggregator 208 may also be included with the social media gateway 106 .
- a message aggregator 208 can, in contrast to the message filter 206 , combine two or more messages into a packet or grouping that is sent to the dialog system 104 . Therefore, the message aggregator 208 can interrelate or combine messages based on information within the messages. For example, two messages may be combined based on any of the message fields referenced above, such as the person that posted the message, the subject, the request or question asked, the person the message was sent to, or other information that may be pertinent to the dialog system 104 . Thus, the dialog system 104 may be able to respond concurrently to two or more messages based on a grouping provided by the message aggregator 208 . Regardless of whether the messages are aggregated, each message or grouping of messages can be sent from the social media gateway 106 to the dialog system 104 .
- the social media gateway 106 can also send responses back to the social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- a response from an agent 228 in the contact center 102 can be sent to the social media gateway 106 .
- the response may be in a general format and translated.
- the translated response may then be posted to the appropriate social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 by the social media gateway 106 .
- the agent may post the response directly to the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 without sending the response to the social media gateway 106 .
- the dialog system 104 can include one or more components which may be hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software.
- the dialog system 104 can be executed by a computer system such as those described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 .
- the components described in conjunction with FIG. 2B are logic circuits or other specially-designed hardware that are embodied in a FPGA or ASIC.
- the components contained within the dialog system 104 can include a dialog core 210 that is communication with a message history database 222 , an agent interface 224 , and a heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 . Further, the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 can be in communication with a dialog creator 220 .
- the dialog core 210 can include one or more sub-components.
- the dialog core 210 can include a trend analysis component 212 , a text processing component 214 , and an analysis tools component 216 .
- These components similar to the components for the dialog system 104 , can be hardware, software, or combination of hardware and software.
- the dialog core 210 may step through the states of a dialog data structure.
- a dialog data structure can include a set of inputs and associated actions that can be taken which allow for the automatic and structured response to social media requests or messages. For example, if a user asks for a manual, the input of the text word “manual” can cause the dialog system 104 in accordance with a dialog data structure, to send information about one or more manuals.
- the receiver of the response may respond, in kind, with the selection of a certain user manual.
- the dialog data structure may then instruct the dialog core to send the user to a website where the user can retrieve an electronic version of the manual.
- the dialog data structure provides a script a dialog that allows the dialog core 210 to automate the interaction between the contact center 102 and a person. This automation eliminates the need for agent involvement, in some situations, and makes the contact center 102 more efficient and more effective. Further, the automation expands the contact center's ability to answer numerous messages from the plethora of postings on the numerous social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the dialog creator 220 will create a dialog data structure 300 that includes instructions for various states for each social media message that comes into the contact center 102 .
- the first instruction might be to send the social media message to the trend analysis component 212 , then to the text processing component 214 , and then execute a query of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database 232 (to determine if this user has an existing order).
- CRM database 232 can be a database as described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 and can store information about customers or other data related to customer relations.
- the dialog data structure 220 might decide that the social media message should be sent to a human agent 228 for processing.
- the instructions or node transitions are executed in the dialog core 210 and make use of many different components that the dialog creator 220 combines in any way the user desires to handle the social media messages.
- the dialog core 210 can make use of the trend analysis component 212 , text processing component 214 , or other systems.
- the dialog core 210 may also interface with a CRM system and/or database 232 , external databases, social media user information (e.g., followers, friends, post history, etc. from the social media site), or other systems.
- the trend analysis component 212 is operable to analyze trends that occur between two or more messages received by the social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the two messages can be from different social media networks, so that the trend analysis component 212 can identify trends across several different social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- Trends can include multiple occurrences of the same word or phrase, multiple occurrences of a customer identity, product name or service, or multiple occurrences of some other information that might indicate a trend.
- the trend analysis component 212 may be able to identify escalations in the occurrences of particular text, identities, or other information, or may identify multiple occurrences over a period of time.
- the trend analysis component 212 may also be able to apply one or more different algorithms to occurrences of information within the social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the trend analysis component 212 can match the number of occurrences of a phrase or word over a period of time and apply analysis to determine if the occurrences are increasing or decreasing over the period of time.
- the dialog core 210 may detect trending by a customer or user. Each individual social media user may be “trending” on a topic. For example, “Bob” occasionally talks (e.g., tweets/facebook posts) about possible summer vacation plans, but, starting in the month of March, the frequency of mentions for “summer vacation” increases from 0.5 mentions per month across all social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 to 3 mentions per month across all social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- “Bob” occasionally talks (e.g., tweets/facebook posts) about possible summer vacation plans, but, starting in the month of March, the frequency of mentions for “summer vacation” increases from 0.5 mentions per month across all social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 to 3 mentions per month across all social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the increase may be a positive short term trend for an individual user that may trigger a summer travel advertising campaign to “Bob.”
- a baseline of activity on a topic may be determined then the dialog core 210 can notice significant changes (i.e., statistically significant changes) that may be valuable information for a business.
- trends are meaningful with an understanding of what the base “noise” level is for a social media user.
- threshold levels i.e., the levels at which a customer becomes valuable
- threshold levels can be automatically adjusted. For example, if a major media outlet (e.g., Time Magazine) writes an article on time share condos as a vacation option, the average level of conversation on time share condos for vacation may increase across a large body of users. An average number of mentions, for the whole of social media users, of time shares may increase. As such, trying to determine a valuable customer may not function with an unadjusted threshold because too many people may go over the threshold.
- the dialog core 210 may automatically adjust the threshold based on the actions of the whole of social media users to cull out those users that post in excess of the larger general trend.
- the average number of mentions can fluctuate with external factors. Users that exceed the average number of mentions per unit time might be showing greater interest or potential.
- This analysis optimizes the use of contact center resources in attempting to connect to interested/interesting/influential customers. Functional use of a trend may require a threshold.
- the thresholds can be fixed or based on data across either time (frequency/time>N, where N is either fixed or a computed average), between users and groups (A relative to B), or a combination of the two.
- the text processing component 214 is operable to analyze text of one or more messages from social media networks 112 , 114 , or 116 .
- Some possible methods for text processing can include Regular Expression, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), text part of speech tagging, text clustering, N-Gram document analysis, etc.
- the text processing component 214 may execute one or more methods of document summarization.
- the summarization may occur if the social media message will be sent to an agent 228 of the contact center 102 ; the summarization can reduce the amount of information that the agent may manage.
- the text processing rules or models may be stored in and/or retrieved from a text processing rules database 230 .
- the text processing rules database 230 can be a database as described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 that stores rules or models used by the text processing component 214 .
- the text processing component 214 can identify one or more occurrences of a particular text, such as using one or more of the message fields referenced above, in order to associate that social media message with one or more dialogs data structures in the heuristic rules and dialog database 218 . For example, the text processing component 214 can look for the word “manual,” in the social media message. If the word “manual” is found, the text processing component 214 may retrieve a dialog data structure from the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 , and, as the dialog data structure instructs, communicates with the customer about one or more owner's manuals, repair manuals, or other types of manuals.
- the text processing component 214 can retrieve one or more dialog data structures from the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 that can provide instruction to assist the customer in purchasing products or services from the enterprise.
- the analysis tools component 216 is operable to analyze response messages received back from an agent interface 224 . In analyzing the agent's responses, the analysis tools component 216 can determine if the dialog data structures 300 ( FIG. 3 ) originally retrieved by the text processing component 214 met the needs of the customer. In the analysis, the agent may enter one or more items of information, for the analysis tools component 216 , about the response and about how the response matched with the dialog data structures 300 . The analysis tools component 216 can review the response and determine if it was similar to the response provided by the dialog data structure 300 ( FIG. 3 ). Thus, the analysis tools component 216 can provide information to the dialog core 210 or the dialog creator 220 to improve the dialog data structures 300 ( FIG. 3 ) that are included in the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 .
- the message history database 222 can be any database or data storage system as described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 .
- the message history database 222 can store data in data fields, objects, or other data structures to allow other systems to retrieve that information at a later time.
- the message history database 222 can store previous messages or information about previous messages.
- the trend analysis component 212 can retrieve information about previous messages associated with the current analysis from the message history database 222 .
- the trend analysis component 212 can better detect trends occurring at the social media networks 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the data stored by the message history database 222 can include the entire message or only a portion of the message, and in some circumstances, include metadata about the message(s).
- the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 can be any type of database or data storage system as described in conjunction with FIGS. 6 and 7 .
- the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 can store information in data fields, data objects, and/or any other data structures. An example of information stored within the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 is described in conjunction with FIG. 3 .
- the heuristic rules and dialogs database 218 stores rules and dialogs data structures that automate responses to received social media messages.
- the dialogs data structures control the interaction between the dialog core 210 and the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the dialogs or heuristic rules can be created by a dialog creator 220 .
- the dialog creator 220 can interface with user input 226 to receive information about dialogs.
- the user input 226 is then used to form the states and responses for a dialog data structure.
- An agent interface 224 is a communication system operable to send action items to contact center agents, in the contact center 102 .
- An agent 228 can be a person or other system that is operable to respond to certain questions or requests from a customer.
- the agent 228 can be a person that has specialized expertise in a topic area, such as technical support.
- the agent interface 224 can format the social message into an action item and forward that message to one or more agents 228 .
- the agent interface 224 can also receive response(s) back from the agents 228 .
- the information provided by the agent 228 may be used by the dialog core 210 to complete a response to the social media message.
- the information may classify the social media message (e.g., sales, service, etc.).
- the response is a complete response to the social media message that can be posted to the social media network 112 , 114 , and/or 116 .
- the dialog data structure 300 can be stored in several different forms of databases, such as relational databases, flat files, object-oriented databases, etc.
- data field or “segment” is used herein, the data may be stored in an object, an attribute of an object, or some other form of data structure.
- the dialog data structure 300 can be stored, retrieved, sent, or received during the processing of dialogs by the dialog core 210 or the dialog creator 220 .
- the dialog data structure 300 stores one or more items of information in one or more segments.
- the numeric identifiers (e.g. 302 , 304 , etc.) shown in FIG. 3 can identify, the one or more segments.
- the dialog data structure 300 can include one or more input segments, such as, input segment 1 302 and input segment 2 304 , a rules segment 306 , and/or a dialog script segment 308 .
- Input segments 302 and 304 each include one or more inputs that may be required to associate a social media message with the dialog data structure 300 .
- the inputs segments 302 and 304 may include a customer identity, a respective customer type, a text word, a phrase, or other information that indicates that the dialog data structure 300 is associated with or pertaining to the social media messages.
- the input segments 302 and 304 may also include certain trends that the trend analysis component 212 can identify. As such, if a trend is identified and associated with the inputs 302 and/or 304 , the dialog data structure 300 can be retrieved and used by the dialog core 210 . While there are only two input segments 302 and 304 shown in FIG. 3 , there may be more or fewer input segments associated with the dialog data structure 300 , as indicated by ellipses 310 .
- the rules segment 306 can include one or more heuristic rules that either help with the association of the respective dialog data structure 300 with the social media message or control the interaction between the dialog core 210 and the social media customer.
- the rule 306 can state that the dialog data structure 300 applies only if the social media message includes input segment 1 302 but not input segment 2 304 .
- One skilled in the art will be able to identify other types of rules that may govern the association of the dialog data structure 300 with the social media message.
- the rules segment 306 states that if the social media message includes inputs 302 and/or 304 , then the dialog core 210 should respond with a certain type of action.
- a dialog script segment 308 includes a script of actions or responses that direct one or more other components, such as the dialog core 210 ( FIG. 2B ), to conduct actions or send the responses.
- the dialog script segment 308 can include the one or more states and corresponding responses or actions required by the dialog core 210 . If the dialog script segment 308 applies (that is, if the social media message is requesting a certain type of information), the dialog script segment 308 may include the one or more responses that the dialog core 210 should communicate to respond to that social media message.
- the dialog script segment 308 can also include a response and a pointer to another dialog script segment 308 or another dialog data structure 300 .
- dialog script segment 308 may have one or more actions that may be taken by another component after a secondary response is received by a customer.
- the dialog script segment 308 can direct or instruct an interaction to continue with a social media user over a period of time and over several interactions between the user and the contact center 102 .
- dialog script segment 308 can reference one or more other dialog data structures 300 .
- the dialog script segment 308 can direct the dialog core 210 to reference at least one other dialog data structure 300 to further act on the social media message.
- the social media message can be subject of two or more dialog script segments 308 , and direct the dialog core 210 to complete two dialog script segments 308 on the social media message.
- dialog script segments 308 may not be associated with a response but direct the dialog core 210 to complete other actions, such as populating databases or gathering information.
- FIG. 4 An embodiment of a method 400 create a dialog data structure for a contact campaign is shown in FIG. 4 .
- the method 400 begins with a start operation 402 and terminates with an end operation 414 . While a general order for the steps of the method 400 are shown in FIG. 4 , the method 400 can include more or fewer steps or arrange the order of the steps differently than those shown in FIG. 4 .
- the method 400 can be executed as a set of computer-executable instructions executed by a computer system and encoded or stored on a computer readable medium.
- the method 400 shall be explained with reference to the systems, components, modules, software, data structures, etc. described in conjunction with FIGS. 1-3 .
- the dialog creator 220 receives an identity profile, in step 404 .
- the profile can include a type of customer that the enterprise desires to contact.
- the enterprise may send one or more identities to the dialog creator 220 .
- the profile or the identities is submitted as user inputs 226 .
- An identity can be a name of a person, a user name used in a social network 112 , an address, a phone number, an email address, or some other identifying information.
- the profile can include income characteristics, buying patterns, typical postings by a user or other information that may be able to identify one or more customers.
- a search term can be any term that should be used to identify a social media message as coming from a customer that the enterprise desires to contact.
- a search term can be a mention of a product or situation, can be a characteristic of a customer, such as a buying trend, etc.
- An association can include some type of association between the customer and another entity or group. For example on Facebook, the customer may associate with or be a friend or fan of a group. For example, the association can include a friend or fan association with a group that promotes travel to Europe, promotes a type of musical instrument, promotes a vegetarian diet, etc.
- Dialog creator 220 also receives a campaign communication as user input 226 , in step 408 .
- the campaign communication can be a communication (e.g. a wording for a post on a Social Media Network 112 , 114 and/or 116 ) required by the contact center 102 to communicate to the customer after identifying the customer as a customer in which the enterprise desires to contact.
- the communication can be a message either written or a voice message that can be translated into other media.
- the communication can be sent to the social media user via the social network 112 , 114 and/or 116 or other communication media.
- the dialog creator 220 may also receive campaign parameters, in step 410 .
- Campaign parameters can determine how the ad campaign will be conducted. For example, some of the products desired to be sold by the enterprise may have an expiration date or a date in which they will no longer be available for use. For example, if the enterprise is selling vegetables that have a shelf life, the campaign may only last until the shelf life of the vegetables is reached. In other embodiments, the product may need to be used on a certain day. For example, if there are airline seats available for a certain day of travel to a destination, the campaign may only continue until that airline has flown and the seats are no longer available.
- Campaign parameters may also delineate which social networks to review, may also determine which customers to ignore or find, or other parameters which may dictate how the campaign is conducted.
- the dialog creator 220 can create a data dialog data structure 300 which can store the information received. Then the dialog creator 220 can store the information, in step 412 .
- the profile identities can be stored in an input segment 302 or 304 .
- the search terms or associations can also be stored in an input segment 302 or 304 .
- the campaign communication can be stored in a dialog script segment 308 , while the campaign parameters may be stored in the rule segment 306 .
- the data dialog structure 300 can be stored in the heuristic rules and dialogs data base.
- FIG. 5 An embodiment of a method 500 for processing a response to a message from the social media network site is shown in FIG. 5 .
- the method 500 begins with a start operation 502 and terminates with an end operation 518 . While a general order for the steps of the method 500 are shown in FIG. 5 , the method 500 can include more or fewer steps or arrange the order of the steps differently than those shown in FIG. 5 .
- the method 500 can be executed as a set of computer-executable instructions executed by a computer system and encoded or stored on a computer readable medium.
- the method 500 shall be explained with reference to the systems, components, modules, software, data structures, etc. described in conjunction with FIGS. 1-3 .
- a dialog creator can receive data dialog structure 300 from an enterprise, in step 502 .
- the data dialog structure 300 can include a dialog script for finding one or more customers that may be able to purchase or use a resource that is available from the enterprise.
- the enterprise may be an airline that may have empty seats available for an upcoming flight that needs to be filled.
- the data dialog structure 300 can locate the passengers or people that might be willing to buy those seats for the upcoming flight.
- the enterprise might be a food distributor or food producer that has a type of produce that has an upcoming expiration or spoilage date. If the food is not purchased by a customer, that food may spoil.
- the data dialog structure 300 can help the dialog system in locating customers to purchase that food.
- the first action can be the storing of the data dialog structure 300 in the heuristic rules and dialog database 218 and the triggering of the dialog core 210 to execute the finding of customers according to the data dialog structure 300 .
- the triggering of the dialog core 210 can initiate two actions.
- First action can be text processing component 214 locating incoming social media messages that may indicate a customer desires or a subject to data dialog structure 300 , in step 504 .
- the social media network API 204 can receive messages from the social network, in step 506 , and parse those messages for the dialog core 210 .
- the dialog core 210 can search information within the social media message for relation to the data dialog structure 300 .
- the dialog core 210 detects processing component or the dialog core 210 can search for one or more items that may be part of the input field of the data dialog structure 300 .
- the parsing of the social media message to search the data dialog structure 300 can be completed by the text processing component 214 , in step 508 .
- the sentiment of the social media message may also be ascertained.
- the language of the user in the social media message may indicate their personal feeling about either the seller of the product, the product, or their personal situation. For example, if the user blogs about their frequent flier miles on airline A, but airline B is looking to fill seats, then this user might receive a lower sentiment score relative to someone else who has not mentioned any airline affiliation or who has specifically mentioned the airline with the selling need.
- language in a message like “lost my job” or “attending funeral” might be negative sentiments that would lower the “score” for a user when evaluating the merits of reaching out to them with an offer.
- the other action may be the trend processing component searching for one or more trends of one or more customers in a customer database or other database.
- the trends can show trends and messages that indicate that the customer might be subject to the data dialog structure 300 . For example, if a customer frequently posts about traveling, they may be subject or a person to contact for empty airline seats.
- the dialog core 210 compares the trends and other information from the social media messages to the inputs of the data dialog structure 300 , in step 510 . Thus, any kind of trend or information the social media messages as compared to one or more of the inputs of the data dialog structure 300 .
- the dialog core determines that that person is of interest, in step 512 . If the person is not of interest, the process proceeds “NO” to the end operation 518 . However, if the person is of interest, the step 512 proceeds “YES” to step 514 .
- the dialog core 210 retrieves the data dialog structure 300 and reads the dialog scripts. The dialog script will dictate how the dialog core 210 should proceed after identifying customers of interest. The dialog core 210 can proceed within an advertising campaign according to the dialog script in step 516 .
- the dialog script can provide instructions to the dialog core of how to compose a message to post to the social media network advertising the resource that the enterprise desires to sell.
- the airline may advertise a very good sale price for an airline ticket to the person who may be of interest in buying airline tickets.
- a sale price or coupon may be sent to a person who may desire to purchase produce from the food distributor.
- the data dialog system is operable to assist enterprises in selling or marketing their goods that have short shelf lives or expiration dates.
- FIG. 6 illustrates a block diagram of a computing environment 600 that may function as servers, computers, or other systems provided herein.
- the environment 600 includes one or more user computers 605 , 610 , and 615 .
- the user computers 605 , 610 , and 615 may be general purpose personal computers (including, merely by way of example, personal computers, and/or laptop computers running various versions of Microsoft Corp.'s WindowsTM and/or Apple Corp.'s MacintoshTM operating systems) and/or workstation computers running any of a variety of commercially-available UNIXTM or UNIX-like operating systems.
- These user computers 605 , 610 , 615 may also have any of a variety of applications, including for example, database client and/or server applications, and web browser applications.
- the user computers 605 , 610 , and 615 may be any other electronic device, such as a thin-client computer, Internet-enabled mobile telephone, and/or personal digital assistant, capable of communicating via a network 620 and/or displaying and navigating web pages or other types of electronic documents.
- a thin-client computer such as a thin-client computer, Internet-enabled mobile telephone, and/or personal digital assistant, capable of communicating via a network 620 and/or displaying and navigating web pages or other types of electronic documents.
- personal digital assistant capable of communicating via a network 620 and/or displaying and navigating web pages or other types of electronic documents.
- the Environment 700 further includes a network 720 .
- the network 720 may be any type of network familiar to those skilled in the art that can support data communications using any of a variety of commercially-available protocols, including without limitation SIP, TCP/IP, SNA, IPX, AppleTalk, and the like.
- the network 720 maybe a local area network (“LAN”), such as an Ethernet network, a Token-Ring network and/or the like; a wide-area network; a virtual network, including without limitation a virtual private network (“VPN”); the Internet; an intranet; an extranet; a public switched telephone network (“PSTN”); an infra-red network; a wireless network (e.g., a network operating under any of the IEEE 802.11 suite of protocols, the BluetoothTM protocol known in the art, and/or any other wireless protocol); and/or any combination of these and/or other networks.
- LAN local area network
- VPN virtual private network
- PSTN public switched telephone network
- wireless network e.g., a network operating under any of the IEEE 802.11 suite of protocols, the BluetoothTM protocol known in the art, and/or any other wireless protocol
- the system may also include one or more server 725 , 730 .
- server 725 is shown as a web server and server 730 is shown as an application server.
- the web server 725 which may be used to process requests for web pages or other electronic documents from user computers 705 , 710 , and 715 .
- the web server 725 can be running an operating system including any of those discussed above, as well as any commercially-available server operating systems.
- the web server 725 can also run a variety of server applications, including SIP servers, HTTP servers, FTP servers, CGI servers, database servers, Java servers, and the like. In some instances, the web server 725 may publish operations available operations as one or more web services.
- the environment 700 may also include one or more file and or/application servers 730 , which can, in addition to an operating system, include one or more applications accessible by a client running on one or more of the user computers 705 , 710 , 715 .
- the server(s) 730 and/or 725 may be one or more general purpose computers capable of executing programs or scripts in response to the user computers 705 , 710 and 715 .
- the server 730 , 725 may execute one or more web applications.
- the web application may be implemented as one or more scripts or programs written in any programming language, such as JavaTM, C, C#TM, or C++, and/or any scripting language, such as Perl, Python, or TCL, as well as combinations of any programming/scripting languages.
- the application server(s) 730 may also include database servers, including without limitation those commercially available from Oracle, Microsoft, SybaseTM, IBMTM and the like, which can process requests from database clients running on a user computer 705 .
- the web pages created by the server 725 and/or 730 may be forwarded to a user computer 705 via a web (file) server 725 , 730 .
- the web server 725 may be able to receive web page requests, web services invocations, and/or input data from a user computer 705 and can forward the web page requests and/or input data to the web (application) server 730 .
- the web server 730 may function as a file server.
- FIGS. 1-3 illustrate a separate web server 725 and file/application server 730 , those skilled in the art will recognize that the functions described with respect to servers 725 , 730 may be performed by a single server and/or a plurality of specialized servers, depending on implementation-specific needs and parameters.
- the computer systems 705 , 710 , and 715 , web (file) server 725 and/or web (application) server 730 may function as the system, devices, or components described in FIGS. 1-3 .
- the environment 700 may also include a database 735 .
- the database 735 may reside in a variety of locations.
- database 735 may reside on a storage medium local to (and/or resident in) one or more of the computers 705 , 710 , 715 , 725 , 730 .
- it may be remote from any or all of the computers 705 , 710 , 715 , 725 , 730 , and in communication (e.g., via the network 720 ) with one or more of these.
- the database 735 may reside in a storage-area network (“SAN”) familiar to those skilled in the art.
- SAN storage-area network
- any necessary files for performing the functions attributed to the computers 705 , 710 , 715 , 725 , 730 may be stored locally on the respective computer and/or remotely, as appropriate.
- the database 735 may be a relational database, such as Oracle 10iTM, that is adapted to store, update, and retrieve data in response to SQL-formatted commands.
- FIG. 7 illustrates one embodiment of a computer system 700 upon which the servers, computers, or other systems or components described herein may be deployed or executed.
- the computer system 700 is shown comprising hardware elements that may be electrically coupled via a bus 755 .
- the hardware elements may include one or more central processing units (CPUs) 705 ; one or more input devices 710 (e.g., a mouse, a keyboard, etc.); and one or more output devices 715 (e.g., a display device, a printer, etc.).
- the computer system 700 may also include one or more storage devices 720 .
- storage device(s) 720 may be disk drives, optical storage devices, solid-state storage devices such as a random access memory (“RAM”) and/or a read-only memory (“ROM”), which can be programmable, flash-updateable and/or the like.
- RAM random access memory
- ROM read-only memory
- the computer system 700 may additionally include a computer-readable storage media reader 725 ; a communications system 730 (e.g., a modem, a network card (wireless or wired), an infra-red communication device, etc.); and working memory 740 , which may include RAM and ROM devices as described above.
- the computer system 700 may also include a processing acceleration unit 735 , which can include a DSP, a special-purpose processor, and/or the like.
- the computer-readable storage media reader 725 can further be connected to a computer-readable storage medium, together (and, optionally, in combination with storage device(s) 720 ) comprehensively representing remote, local, fixed, and/or removable storage devices plus storage media for temporarily and/or more permanently containing computer-readable information.
- the communications system 730 may permit data to be exchanged with the network 720 ( FIG. 7 ) and/or any other computer described above with respect to the computer system 700 .
- the term “storage medium” may represent one or more devices for storing data, including read only memory (ROM), random access memory (RAM), magnetic RAM, core memory, magnetic disk storage mediums, optical storage mediums, flash memory devices and/or other machine readable mediums for storing information.
- the computer system 700 may also comprise software elements, shown as being currently located within a working memory 740 , including an operating system 745 and/or other code 750 . It should be appreciated that alternate embodiments of a computer system 700 may have numerous variations from that described above. For example, customized hardware might also be used and/or particular elements might be implemented in hardware, software (including portable software, such as applets), or both. Further, connection to other computing devices such as network input/output devices may be employed.
- machine-executable instructions may be stored on one or more machine readable mediums, such as CD-ROMs or other type of optical disks, floppy diskettes, ROMs, RAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, magnetic or optical cards, flash memory, or other types of machine-readable mediums suitable for storing electronic instructions.
- machine readable mediums such as CD-ROMs or other type of optical disks, floppy diskettes, ROMs, RAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, magnetic or optical cards, flash memory, or other types of machine-readable mediums suitable for storing electronic instructions.
- the methods may be performed by a combination of hardware and software.
- a flowchart may describe the operations as a sequential process, many of the operations can be performed in parallel or concurrently. In addition, the order of the operations may be re-arranged.
- a process is terminated when its operations are completed, but could have additional steps not included in the figure.
- a process may correspond to a method, a function, a procedure, a subroutine, a subprogram, etc. When a process corresponds to a function, its termination corresponds to a return of the function to the calling function or the main function.
- embodiments may be implemented by hardware, software, firmware, middleware, microcode, hardware description languages, or any combination thereof.
- the program code or code segments to perform the necessary tasks may be stored in a machine readable medium such as storage medium.
- a processor(s) may perform the necessary tasks.
- a code segment may represent a procedure, a function, a subprogram, a program, a routine, a subroutine, a module, a software package, a class, or any combination of instructions, data structures, or program statements.
- a code segment may be coupled to another code segment or a hardware circuit by passing and/or receiving information, data, arguments, parameters, or memory contents. Information, arguments, parameters, data, etc. may be passed, forwarded, or transmitted via any suitable means including memory sharing, message passing, token passing, network transmission, etc.
Abstract
Description
- This application claims priority to U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/263,013, filed Nov. 20, 2009, entitled “GEO POD SYSTEM,” which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
- Contact centers generally exchange information with consumers through directed contacts. Directed contacts consist of emails, phone calls, or other forms of communication that are directed to the contact center or the consumer. However, many people today, exchange information or interact through non-direct methods. Non-direct communications require users to post communications to third party sites or forums, but not to direct those communications to a specific person or organization. Non-direct communication methods include social media, which may include websites, networks, blogs, micro-blogs, RSS feeds, social media websites (such as, Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.), and other types of social media. Generally, it is not possible for contact centers to communicate with consumers through non-direct methods. As such, the contact centers may be unable to interact with consumers that use social media to offer certain types of customer service.
- Enterprises often have products to sell to customers. Some of these products may have a short shelf life or have a certain date upon which they need to be sold. Examples of such type of products may be fruits and vegetables, airline tickets, concert tickets, or other types of goods. Enterprises are often left with excess products or services in which they want to provide to willing customers. However, enterprises currently don't have a good ability to find these customers who may be willing to buy these products or services or contact them if they can locate the customers.
- It is with respect to the above issues and other problems that the embodiments presented herein were contemplated. Methods and systems described herein provide a contact center which can locate customers that may be willing to buy goods or services, wherein those goods or services may have shelve lives or pending disposal dates. A profile for a customer is created in a dialog script. Social media messages are analyzed based on the profile to determine if the customer may be of a type that would be willing to buy a certain product. If the customer is such a type that may be willing to buy the product, the contact center can contact the social media user and offer the product or service to that customer. As such, the enterprises receive a service that quickly locates customers that may be willing to buy products and allows the enterprise to dispose of the products that have certain shelf lives.
- The system can have a dialog creator which receives inputs from the user about what type of customers to contact. These user inputs are stored in a dialog data structure. The dialog data structure may then be retrieved by a dialog system, which uses the dialog script to determine customers the enterprise wishes to contact. Upon finding these customers, a communication stored in the dialog script can be sent to the customer to engage them in a contact and offer them goods or services.
- A social media gateway can be used gather information on specific social network users. In addition, data may be collected about the user that may exist on public blogs, wilds, etc. Finally, data sources with public information, e.g., census, zillow.com, etc., may be used to gather more background user information.
- First, a business may identify that the business has some excess capacity, over-stocked inventory, or excess service capacity. The full extent of the excess capacity can be identified in terms of how much inventory available, price levels, time to use, time to expire, or any other distinguishing characteristics. Next, the business can create or identify a previously developed automated “marketing” campaign. The campaign can be included in a dialog data structure that can be executed by the social media contact center. The campaign may utilize automated and, possibly, agent resources to contact identified consumers and quickly sell the excess-capacity resources.
- The campaign can consist of several steps to identify potential consumers. The system can first identify recent discussions on social network sites and those consumers that have a social network relationship with the enterprise who have had “relevant” conversations about the available resource. For example, if United Airlines has extra seats to Paris later this week, then all users who have discussed travel to Europe can be identified.
- As potential customers are identified, the campaign uses any number of text analysis methods to further qualify the potential of the customer based on their recent social media interactions. The customer is also analyzed for potential value based on their demographic data, location, historical purchases, CRM data, or any other information known about the customer. This evaluation may be done through the automated system or by utilizing agents for human analysis.
- Once the customer has been identified, a contact can be made from the business to the customer. Several forms of contact are possible. An agent may reach out directly to the customer. An automated system may reach out to the customer. The customer may be reached through a different channel than that of the initial communication. The initial communication with the customer may be the first attempt to offer the resource to the customer and may include follow-up contact instructions for the user to accept the offer. A key component of the campaign is that the campaign can run for a specified duration. If a resource is set to expire on Friday, the campaign may monitor and run starting on Tuesday for three days or until the resource capacity is met.
- As an example, Flowers.com may have over stocked a specific flower arrangement. To reduce the inventory, Flowers.com starts a campaign using the described system. Since time is short (because the flower arrangement will wilt and die), Flowers.com searches for users over the next few days who discuss special events, such as, birthdays, anniversaries, new job, etc., on any social media network. The automated campaign identifies the potential customers and begins sending out messages or posts either to the social media network or to other communication channels with links to reach an agent to purchase the flower arrangement.
- In another example, United Airlines may have available seats to Paris on Friday. Existing methods of discounting seats may not have filled the seats. As such, United Airlines start a campaign using the described system to identify all people discussing travel and Europe. Over the next few days the automated systems sends out special deals to the selected high value customers. The deal includes a link to a direct agent chat for quick turn-around of the special offer.
- In still another example, a local electronics dealer has 20 HDTVs that are being discontinued and replaced with a newer model. A shipment of the newer model HDTVs is due to arrive soon, and the dealer must sell the 20 older model HDTVS fast. The electronics dealer can create the outbound campaign to identify potential customers that are in the local geographic area and may be able to purchase in the next day or two. In this situation, the location and demographics of the customers is important. The system searches and monitors those discussing, not just TVs, but movies, sports, video games, etc.; thus, the system finds those customers that may be interested in obtaining one of the closeout items.
- The phrases “at least one”, “one or more”, and “and/or” are open-ended expressions that are both conjunctive and disjunctive in operation. For example, each of the expressions “at least one of A, B and C”, “at least one of A, B, or C”, “one or more of A, B, and C”, “one or more of A, B, or C” and “A, B, and/or C” means A alone, B alone, C alone, A and B together, A and C together, B and C together, or A, B and C together.
- The term “a” or “an” entity refers to one or more of that entity. As such, the terms “a” (or “an”), “one or more” and “at least one” can be used interchangeably herein. It is also to be noted that the terms “comprising”, “including”, and “having” can be used interchangeably.
- The term “automatic” and variations thereof, as used herein, refers to any process or operation done without material human input when the process or operation is performed. However, a process or operation can be automatic, even though performance of the process or operation uses material or immaterial human input, if the input is received before performance of the process or operation. Human input is deemed to be material if such input influences how the process or operation will be performed. Human input that consents to the performance of the process or operation is not deemed to be “material”.
- The term “computer-readable medium” as used herein refers to any tangible storage that participates in providing instructions to a processor for execution. Such a medium may take many forms, including but not limited to, non-volatile media, volatile media, and transmission media. Non-volatile media includes, for example, NVRAM, or magnetic or optical disks. Volatile media includes dynamic memory, such as main memory. Common forms of computer-readable media include, for example, a floppy disk, a flexible disk, hard disk, magnetic tape, or any other magnetic medium, magneto-optical medium, a CD-ROM, any other optical medium, punch cards, paper tape, any other physical medium with patterns of holes, a RAM, a PROM, and EPROM, a FLASH-EPROM, a solid state medium like a memory card, any other memory chip or cartridge, or any other medium from which a computer can read. When the computer-readable media is configured as a database, it is to be understood that the database may be any type of database, such as relational, hierarchical, object-oriented, and/or the like. Accordingly, the invention is considered to include a tangible storage medium and prior art-recognized equivalents and successor media, in which the software implementations of the present invention are stored.
- The terms “determine”, “calculate”, and “compute,” and variations thereof, as used herein, are used interchangeably and include any type of methodology, process, mathematical operation, or technique.
- The term “module” as used herein refers to any known or later developed hardware, software, firmware, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, or combination of hardware and software that is capable of performing the functionality associated with that element. Also, while the invention is described in terms of exemplary embodiments, it should be appreciated that individual aspects of the invention can be separately claimed.
- An “advertising campaign” as used herein is any indirect or direct effort to entice a consumer to buy a product or service.
- The present disclosure is described in conjunction with the appended figures:
-
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a communication system operable to interact with persons using a social media network; -
FIG. 2A is a block diagram of an embodiment of a social media gateway; -
FIG. 2B is a block diagram of an embodiment of a dialog system; -
FIG. 3 is a block diagram of embodiments of a dialog data structure; -
FIG. 4 is a flow diagram of an embodiment of a process for creating a dialog data structure that can be used to direct a campaign; -
FIG. 5 is a flow diagram of an embodiment a process for finding customers that may be willing to buy excess-capacity goods or services; -
FIG. 6 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a computing environment; -
FIG. 7 is a block diagram of an embodiment of a computer system. - In the appended figures, similar components and/or features may have the same reference label. Further, various components of the same type may be distinguished by following the reference label by a letter that distinguishes among the similar components. If only the first reference label is used in the specification, the description is applicable to any one of the similar components having the same first reference label irrespective of the second reference label.
- The ensuing description provides embodiments only, and is not intended to limit the scope, applicability, or configuration of the claims. Rather, the ensuing description will provide those skilled in the art with an enabling description for implementing the embodiments. Various changes may be made in the function and arrangement of elements of the embodiment without departing from the spirit and scope of the appended claims.
- A
communication system 100, for interacting with persons using social media is shown inFIG. 1 . Thecommunication system 100 can include acontact center 102, anetwork 108, and one or more types of social media networks or systems, such associal media network 1 112,social media network 2 114, and/orsocial media network 3 116.Social media networks communication system 100 can communicate with more or fewersocial media networks FIG. 1 , as represented byellipses 118. - The
network 108 can be any network or system operable to allow communication between thecontact center 102 and the one or moresocial media networks network 108 can represent any communication system, whether wired or wireless, using any protocol and/or format. Thenetwork 108 provides communication capability for thecontact center 102 to communicate with websites or systems corresponding to the one or moresocial media networks network 108 can represent two or more networks, where each network is a different communication system using different communication protocols and/or formats and/or different hardware and software. For example,network 108 can be a wide area network, local area network, the Internet, a cellular telephone network, or some other type of communication system. Thenetwork 108 may be as described in conjunction withFIGS. 6 and 7 . - A
contact center 102 can be a system that can communicate with one or more persons that use socialmedia networking sites contact center 102 can be hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software. Thecontact center 102 can be executed by one or more servers or computer systems, as described in conjunction withFIGS. 8 and 9 . Thecontact center 102 can include all systems, whether hardware or software, that allow thecontact center 102 to receive, service, and respond to directed and non-directed contacts. For example thecontact center 102 can include the telephone or email system, an interface to human agents, systems to allow human agents to service and respond to received contacts, and one or more systems operable to analyze and improve the function of agent interaction. - The
contact center 102 may include adialog system 104 and asocial media gateway 106. While thedialog system 104 and thesocial media gateway 106 are shown as being a part of thecontact system 102, in other embodiments, thedialog system 104 and/or thesocial media gateway 106 are separate systems or functions executed separately from thecontact center 102 and/or executed by a third party. Thedialog system 104 may process and receive messages. Thesocial media gateway 106 can receive and translate messages from the one or moresocial media networks dialog system 104 is described in conjunction withFIG. 2B . An embodiment of thesocial media gateway 106 is described in conjunction withFIG. 2A . - The
contact center 102 may also communicate with one ormore communication devices 110. Thecommunication devices 110 can represent a customer's or user's cell phone, email system, personal digital assistant, laptop computer, or other device that allows thecontact center 102 to interact with the customer. Thecontact center 102 can modify a non-direct contact, from asocial media network communication device 110. - An embodiment of the
social media gateway 106 is shown inFIG. 2A . Thesocial media gateway 106 can include one or more components which may include hardware, software, or combination of hardware and software. Thesocial media gateway 106 can be executed by a computer system, such as those described in conjunction withFIGS. 6 and 7 . However, in other embodiments, the components described in conjunction withFIG. 2A are logic circuits or other specially-designed hardware that are embodied in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or other hardware. - Herein, the
social media gateway 106 can include one ormore content filters contact center 102 from asocial media network contact center 102, may not need a response. As such, the content filter 202 can filter out or delete the non-suitable message from the messages that are received by the social media network application programming interface (API) 1 204 a, socialmedia network API 2 204 b, and/or socialmedia network API 3 204 c. With the content filter 202, the social media network API 204 only needs to translate those messages that should be received by thedialog system 104. Translation typically requires the conversion of the message into a different format. - The content filter 202 is provided with one or more heuristics for filter rules from a filter database (not shown). These filter rules can be created by the external customer or internal user (e.g. agent or administrator) of the
communication system 100. Thus, the user or customer of thecommunication system 100 can customize the filtering of messages fromsocial media networks social media networks social media networks social media networks social media gateway 106, it is to be appreciated that the content filter 202 may be a part of the social media network API 204. The content filter 202 may correspond to query terms used by the social media network API 204. The content filter 202 or query terms are an argument to the social media network API 204 call. - The social media network API 204 can be an application that the
social media network social media gateway 106 and to thesocial media network contact center 102 and/or the products or services of the enterprise. - The
social media gateway 106 can include one or more social media network APIs 204. As shown inFIG. 2A , thesocial media gateway 106 may include a social media network API 204 for eachsocial media network social media gateway 106 can interact with eachsocial media network social media network social media gateway 106 can be easily expanded to interact with those social media networks by adding another social media network API 204. Wheresocial media networks 112 are more standardized, or use substantially similar formats or protocols, a single social media network API can be shared by multiple social media networks 112-116. - The social media network API 204 can receive messages from and send messages to the
social media network social media network message filter 206. The social media network API 204 can translate the received message into a standard formatted file. For example, the translated message may be represented by an extensible mark-up language (XML) file or other file having a general format. As such, each specific and particular social media network message can be translated into a standard format for use by thedialog system 104. Further, the social media network API 204 can receive a generally or standard format response message, from thedialog system 104, and translate that response into a particularly or specifically formatted response message that can be posted to the correspondingsocial media network - Messages to the
contact center 102 are addressed to thecontact center 102. For example, a customer may become a “friend” of thecontact center 102 on asocial media network 114, such as Facebook. The customer may then address a message to thecontact center 102 on Facebook. This non-direct contact is a message that is not sent directly to thecontact center 102 but to the contact center's Facebook page. In other embodiments, thecontact center 102 receives messages not addressed to thecontact center 102. For example, thecontact center 102 can receive tweets from Twitter that are “broadcast” rather than addressed to thecontact center 102. Thecontact center 102 may also search for messages or content on thesocial media networks social media gateway 106 of thecontact center 102 can query, gather, or connect to a live feed of data from asocial media network - The translated messages from the social media network API 204 can be received by a
message filter 206. Amessage filter 206 can perform some or all of the functions of the content filter 202 and eliminate messages before being sent to thedialog system 104. However, in other embodiments, themessage filter 206 eliminates information from within the messages before the redacted messages are sent to thedialog system 104. For example, a message from asocial media network 112 may have three or four interactions between two parties not associated with thecontact center 102. Only one of the several postings may be pertinent to thedialog system 104. As such, themessage filter 206 can eliminate or delete at least a portion of the other messages for thedialog system 104. Thus, thedialog system 104 receives a message where some of the content of the message has been deleted. Themessage filter 206 can retrieve heuristics or filter rules from a filter database (not shown), similar to the content filter 202. A substantial difference between the content and message filters 202 and 206 is that the content filter 202 is specific to a particular message format associated with a correspondingsocial media network message filter 206 is applied to a standardized or universal format and is therefore common to multiplesocial media networks dialog system 104. - A
message aggregator 208 may also be included with thesocial media gateway 106. Amessage aggregator 208 can, in contrast to themessage filter 206, combine two or more messages into a packet or grouping that is sent to thedialog system 104. Therefore, themessage aggregator 208 can interrelate or combine messages based on information within the messages. For example, two messages may be combined based on any of the message fields referenced above, such as the person that posted the message, the subject, the request or question asked, the person the message was sent to, or other information that may be pertinent to thedialog system 104. Thus, thedialog system 104 may be able to respond concurrently to two or more messages based on a grouping provided by themessage aggregator 208. Regardless of whether the messages are aggregated, each message or grouping of messages can be sent from thesocial media gateway 106 to thedialog system 104. - The
social media gateway 106 can also send responses back to thesocial media networks agent 228 in thecontact center 102 can be sent to thesocial media gateway 106. The response may be in a general format and translated. The translated response may then be posted to the appropriatesocial media network social media gateway 106. In other embodiments, the agent may post the response directly to thesocial media network social media gateway 106. - An embodiment of the
dialog system 104 is shown inFIG. 2B . Thedialog system 104 can include one or more components which may be hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software. Thedialog system 104 can be executed by a computer system such as those described in conjunction withFIGS. 6 and 7 . However, in other embodiments, the components described in conjunction withFIG. 2B , are logic circuits or other specially-designed hardware that are embodied in a FPGA or ASIC. The components contained within thedialog system 104 can include adialog core 210 that is communication with a message history database 222, anagent interface 224, and a heuristic rules anddialogs database 218. Further, the heuristic rules anddialogs database 218 can be in communication with adialog creator 220. - The
dialog core 210 can include one or more sub-components. For example, thedialog core 210 can include atrend analysis component 212, atext processing component 214, and ananalysis tools component 216. These components, similar to the components for thedialog system 104, can be hardware, software, or combination of hardware and software. Thedialog core 210 may step through the states of a dialog data structure. A dialog data structure can include a set of inputs and associated actions that can be taken which allow for the automatic and structured response to social media requests or messages. For example, if a user asks for a manual, the input of the text word “manual” can cause thedialog system 104 in accordance with a dialog data structure, to send information about one or more manuals. In turn, the receiver of the response may respond, in kind, with the selection of a certain user manual. In which case, the dialog data structure may then instruct the dialog core to send the user to a website where the user can retrieve an electronic version of the manual. As such, the dialog data structure provides a script a dialog that allows thedialog core 210 to automate the interaction between thecontact center 102 and a person. This automation eliminates the need for agent involvement, in some situations, and makes thecontact center 102 more efficient and more effective. Further, the automation expands the contact center's ability to answer numerous messages from the plethora of postings on the numeroussocial media networks - The
dialog creator 220 will create adialog data structure 300 that includes instructions for various states for each social media message that comes into thecontact center 102. The first instruction might be to send the social media message to thetrend analysis component 212, then to thetext processing component 214, and then execute a query of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database 232 (to determine if this user has an existing order). ACRM database 232 can be a database as described in conjunction withFIGS. 6 and 7 and can store information about customers or other data related to customer relations. Finally thedialog data structure 220 might decide that the social media message should be sent to ahuman agent 228 for processing. The instructions or node transitions are executed in thedialog core 210 and make use of many different components that thedialog creator 220 combines in any way the user desires to handle the social media messages. Thedialog core 210 can make use of thetrend analysis component 212,text processing component 214, or other systems. Thedialog core 210 may also interface with a CRM system and/ordatabase 232, external databases, social media user information (e.g., followers, friends, post history, etc. from the social media site), or other systems. - The
trend analysis component 212 is operable to analyze trends that occur between two or more messages received by thesocial media networks trend analysis component 212 can identify trends across several differentsocial media networks trend analysis component 212 may be able to identify escalations in the occurrences of particular text, identities, or other information, or may identify multiple occurrences over a period of time. Thetrend analysis component 212 may also be able to apply one or more different algorithms to occurrences of information within thesocial media networks trend analysis component 212 can match the number of occurrences of a phrase or word over a period of time and apply analysis to determine if the occurrences are increasing or decreasing over the period of time. - The
dialog core 210 may detect trending by a customer or user. Each individual social media user may be “trending” on a topic. For example, “Bob” occasionally talks (e.g., tweets/facebook posts) about possible summer vacation plans, but, starting in the month of March, the frequency of mentions for “summer vacation” increases from 0.5 mentions per month across allsocial media networks social media networks dialog core 210 can notice significant changes (i.e., statistically significant changes) that may be valuable information for a business. In other words, trends are meaningful with an understanding of what the base “noise” level is for a social media user. - Further, a trend for one user may be compared to the trends of other users, either as individuals or as aggregated groups. With the comparison information, threshold levels (i.e., the levels at which a customer becomes valuable) can be automatically adjusted. For example, if a major media outlet (e.g., Time Magazine) writes an article on time share condos as a vacation option, the average level of conversation on time share condos for vacation may increase across a large body of users. An average number of mentions, for the whole of social media users, of time shares may increase. As such, trying to determine a valuable customer may not function with an unadjusted threshold because too many people may go over the threshold. However, the
dialog core 210 may automatically adjust the threshold based on the actions of the whole of social media users to cull out those users that post in excess of the larger general trend. Thus, for any given topic, there is an average number of mentions. The average number of mentions can fluctuate with external factors. Users that exceed the average number of mentions per unit time might be showing greater interest or potential. This analysis optimizes the use of contact center resources in attempting to connect to interested/interesting/influential customers. Functional use of a trend may require a threshold. The thresholds can be fixed or based on data across either time (frequency/time>N, where N is either fixed or a computed average), between users and groups (A relative to B), or a combination of the two. - The
text processing component 214 is operable to analyze text of one or more messages fromsocial media networks text processing component 214 may execute one or more methods of document summarization. The summarization may occur if the social media message will be sent to anagent 228 of thecontact center 102; the summarization can reduce the amount of information that the agent may manage. The text processing rules or models may be stored in and/or retrieved from a textprocessing rules database 230. The textprocessing rules database 230 can be a database as described in conjunction withFIGS. 6 and 7 that stores rules or models used by thetext processing component 214. - The
text processing component 214 can identify one or more occurrences of a particular text, such as using one or more of the message fields referenced above, in order to associate that social media message with one or more dialogs data structures in the heuristic rules anddialog database 218. For example, thetext processing component 214 can look for the word “manual,” in the social media message. If the word “manual” is found, thetext processing component 214 may retrieve a dialog data structure from the heuristic rules anddialogs database 218, and, as the dialog data structure instructs, communicates with the customer about one or more owner's manuals, repair manuals, or other types of manuals. In another example, if the social media message includes the words, “buy”, “sell”, “price, “discount” or other types of words that may indicate the user or customer wishes to buy a product, thetext processing component 214 can retrieve one or more dialog data structures from the heuristic rules anddialogs database 218 that can provide instruction to assist the customer in purchasing products or services from the enterprise. - The
analysis tools component 216 is operable to analyze response messages received back from anagent interface 224. In analyzing the agent's responses, theanalysis tools component 216 can determine if the dialog data structures 300 (FIG. 3 ) originally retrieved by thetext processing component 214 met the needs of the customer. In the analysis, the agent may enter one or more items of information, for theanalysis tools component 216, about the response and about how the response matched with thedialog data structures 300. Theanalysis tools component 216 can review the response and determine if it was similar to the response provided by the dialog data structure 300 (FIG. 3 ). Thus, theanalysis tools component 216 can provide information to thedialog core 210 or thedialog creator 220 to improve the dialog data structures 300 (FIG. 3 ) that are included in the heuristic rules anddialogs database 218. - The message history database 222 can be any database or data storage system as described in conjunction with
FIGS. 6 and 7 . Thus, the message history database 222 can store data in data fields, objects, or other data structures to allow other systems to retrieve that information at a later time. The message history database 222 can store previous messages or information about previous messages. Thus, for example, if thetrend analysis component 212 is analyzing several messages over a period of time, thetrend analysis component 212 can retrieve information about previous messages associated with the current analysis from the message history database 222. As such, thetrend analysis component 212 can better detect trends occurring at thesocial media networks - The heuristic rules and
dialogs database 218 can be any type of database or data storage system as described in conjunction withFIGS. 6 and 7 . The heuristic rules anddialogs database 218 can store information in data fields, data objects, and/or any other data structures. An example of information stored within the heuristic rules anddialogs database 218 is described in conjunction withFIG. 3 . The heuristic rules anddialogs database 218 stores rules and dialogs data structures that automate responses to received social media messages. The dialogs data structures control the interaction between thedialog core 210 and thesocial media network dialog creator 220. Thus, thedialog creator 220 can interface with user input 226 to receive information about dialogs. The user input 226 is then used to form the states and responses for a dialog data structure. - An
agent interface 224 is a communication system operable to send action items to contact center agents, in thecontact center 102. Anagent 228 can be a person or other system that is operable to respond to certain questions or requests from a customer. For example, theagent 228 can be a person that has specialized expertise in a topic area, such as technical support. Theagent interface 224 can format the social message into an action item and forward that message to one ormore agents 228. Theagent interface 224 can also receive response(s) back from theagents 228. The information provided by theagent 228 may be used by thedialog core 210 to complete a response to the social media message. For example, the information may classify the social media message (e.g., sales, service, etc.). In other embodiments, the response is a complete response to the social media message that can be posted to thesocial media network - An embodiment of a
dialog data structure 300 is shown inFIG. 3 . Thedialog data structure 300 can be stored in several different forms of databases, such as relational databases, flat files, object-oriented databases, etc. Thus, while the term “data field” or “segment” is used herein, the data may be stored in an object, an attribute of an object, or some other form of data structure. Further, thedialog data structure 300 can be stored, retrieved, sent, or received during the processing of dialogs by thedialog core 210 or thedialog creator 220. Thedialog data structure 300 stores one or more items of information in one or more segments. The numeric identifiers (e.g. 302, 304, etc.) shown inFIG. 3 can identify, the one or more segments. - The
dialog data structure 300 can include one or more input segments, such as,input segment 1 302 andinput segment 2 304, arules segment 306, and/or adialog script segment 308.Input segments dialog data structure 300. Theinputs segments dialog data structure 300 is associated with or pertaining to the social media messages. - The
input segments trend analysis component 212 can identify. As such, if a trend is identified and associated with theinputs 302 and/or 304, thedialog data structure 300 can be retrieved and used by thedialog core 210. While there are only twoinput segments FIG. 3 , there may be more or fewer input segments associated with thedialog data structure 300, as indicated byellipses 310. - The
rules segment 306 can include one or more heuristic rules that either help with the association of the respectivedialog data structure 300 with the social media message or control the interaction between thedialog core 210 and the social media customer. For example, therule 306 can state that thedialog data structure 300 applies only if the social media message includesinput segment 1 302 but not inputsegment 2 304. One skilled in the art will be able to identify other types of rules that may govern the association of thedialog data structure 300 with the social media message. In other embodiments, therules segment 306 states that if the social media message includesinputs 302 and/or 304, then thedialog core 210 should respond with a certain type of action. - Generally, a
dialog script segment 308 includes a script of actions or responses that direct one or more other components, such as the dialog core 210 (FIG. 2B ), to conduct actions or send the responses. Thedialog script segment 308 can include the one or more states and corresponding responses or actions required by thedialog core 210. If thedialog script segment 308 applies (that is, if the social media message is requesting a certain type of information), thedialog script segment 308 may include the one or more responses that thedialog core 210 should communicate to respond to that social media message. Thedialog script segment 308 can also include a response and a pointer to anotherdialog script segment 308 or anotherdialog data structure 300. Further, thedialog script segment 308 may have one or more actions that may be taken by another component after a secondary response is received by a customer. Thus, thedialog script segment 308 can direct or instruct an interaction to continue with a social media user over a period of time and over several interactions between the user and thecontact center 102. - It should be noted that the
dialog script segment 308 can reference one or more otherdialog data structures 300. Thus, thedialog script segment 308 can direct thedialog core 210 to reference at least one otherdialog data structure 300 to further act on the social media message. Further, the social media message can be subject of two or moredialog script segments 308, and direct thedialog core 210 to complete twodialog script segments 308 on the social media message. Also,dialog script segments 308 may not be associated with a response but direct thedialog core 210 to complete other actions, such as populating databases or gathering information. - An embodiment of a
method 400 create a dialog data structure for a contact campaign is shown inFIG. 4 . Generally, themethod 400 begins with astart operation 402 and terminates with anend operation 414. While a general order for the steps of themethod 400 are shown inFIG. 4 , themethod 400 can include more or fewer steps or arrange the order of the steps differently than those shown inFIG. 4 . Themethod 400 can be executed as a set of computer-executable instructions executed by a computer system and encoded or stored on a computer readable medium. Hereinafter, themethod 400 shall be explained with reference to the systems, components, modules, software, data structures, etc. described in conjunction withFIGS. 1-3 . - The
dialog creator 220 receives an identity profile, instep 404. The profile can include a type of customer that the enterprise desires to contact. In other embodiments, the enterprise may send one or more identities to thedialog creator 220. The profile or the identities is submitted as user inputs 226. An identity can be a name of a person, a user name used in asocial network 112, an address, a phone number, an email address, or some other identifying information. The profile can include income characteristics, buying patterns, typical postings by a user or other information that may be able to identify one or more customers. - User input 226 is also submitted to the
dialog creator 220 that includes search terms or associations, instep 406. A search term can be any term that should be used to identify a social media message as coming from a customer that the enterprise desires to contact. For example, a search term can be a mention of a product or situation, can be a characteristic of a customer, such as a buying trend, etc. An association can include some type of association between the customer and another entity or group. For example on Facebook, the customer may associate with or be a friend or fan of a group. For example, the association can include a friend or fan association with a group that promotes travel to Europe, promotes a type of musical instrument, promotes a vegetarian diet, etc. -
Dialog creator 220 also receives a campaign communication as user input 226, instep 408. The campaign communication can be a communication (e.g. a wording for a post on aSocial Media Network contact center 102 to communicate to the customer after identifying the customer as a customer in which the enterprise desires to contact. The communication can be a message either written or a voice message that can be translated into other media. The communication can be sent to the social media user via thesocial network - The
dialog creator 220 may also receive campaign parameters, instep 410. Campaign parameters can determine how the ad campaign will be conducted. For example, some of the products desired to be sold by the enterprise may have an expiration date or a date in which they will no longer be available for use. For example, if the enterprise is selling vegetables that have a shelf life, the campaign may only last until the shelf life of the vegetables is reached. In other embodiments, the product may need to be used on a certain day. For example, if there are airline seats available for a certain day of travel to a destination, the campaign may only continue until that airline has flown and the seats are no longer available. Campaign parameters may also delineate which social networks to review, may also determine which customers to ignore or find, or other parameters which may dictate how the campaign is conducted. - After receiving the information, the
dialog creator 220 can create a datadialog data structure 300 which can store the information received. Then thedialog creator 220 can store the information, instep 412. For example, the profile identities can be stored in aninput segment input segment dialog script segment 308, while the campaign parameters may be stored in therule segment 306. After storing the information in thedata dialog structure 300, thedata dialog structure 300 can be stored in the heuristic rules and dialogs data base. - An embodiment of a
method 500 for processing a response to a message from the social media network site is shown inFIG. 5 . Generally, themethod 500 begins with astart operation 502 and terminates with anend operation 518. While a general order for the steps of themethod 500 are shown inFIG. 5 , themethod 500 can include more or fewer steps or arrange the order of the steps differently than those shown inFIG. 5 . Themethod 500 can be executed as a set of computer-executable instructions executed by a computer system and encoded or stored on a computer readable medium. Hereinafter, themethod 500 shall be explained with reference to the systems, components, modules, software, data structures, etc. described in conjunction withFIGS. 1-3 . - A dialog creator can receive
data dialog structure 300 from an enterprise, instep 502. Thedata dialog structure 300 can include a dialog script for finding one or more customers that may be able to purchase or use a resource that is available from the enterprise. For example, the enterprise may be an airline that may have empty seats available for an upcoming flight that needs to be filled. Thedata dialog structure 300 can locate the passengers or people that might be willing to buy those seats for the upcoming flight. In another example the enterprise might be a food distributor or food producer that has a type of produce that has an upcoming expiration or spoilage date. If the food is not purchased by a customer, that food may spoil. As such thedata dialog structure 300 can help the dialog system in locating customers to purchase that food. - Two or more actions may be conducted concurrently, simultaneously, or near simultaneously. The first action can be the storing of the
data dialog structure 300 in the heuristic rules anddialog database 218 and the triggering of thedialog core 210 to execute the finding of customers according to thedata dialog structure 300. The triggering of thedialog core 210 can initiate two actions. First action can betext processing component 214 locating incoming social media messages that may indicate a customer desires or a subject todata dialog structure 300, instep 504. Thus, the social media network API 204 can receive messages from the social network, instep 506, and parse those messages for thedialog core 210. Once sent to thedialog core 210, thedialog core 210 can search information within the social media message for relation to thedata dialog structure 300. Thus, thedialog core 210 detects processing component or thedialog core 210 can search for one or more items that may be part of the input field of thedata dialog structure 300. The parsing of the social media message to search thedata dialog structure 300 can be completed by thetext processing component 214, instep 508. The sentiment of the social media message may also be ascertained. In other words, the language of the user in the social media message may indicate their personal feeling about either the seller of the product, the product, or their personal situation. For example, if the user blogs about their frequent flier miles on airline A, but airline B is looking to fill seats, then this user might receive a lower sentiment score relative to someone else who has not mentioned any airline affiliation or who has specifically mentioned the airline with the selling need. In another example, language in a message like “lost my job” or “attending funeral” might be negative sentiments that would lower the “score” for a user when evaluating the merits of reaching out to them with an offer. - The other action may be the trend processing component searching for one or more trends of one or more customers in a customer database or other database. The trends can show trends and messages that indicate that the customer might be subject to the
data dialog structure 300. For example, if a customer frequently posts about traveling, they may be subject or a person to contact for empty airline seats. Thedialog core 210 compares the trends and other information from the social media messages to the inputs of thedata dialog structure 300, instep 510. Thus, any kind of trend or information the social media messages as compared to one or more of the inputs of thedata dialog structure 300. - If the customer relates or may be a person of interest to the enterprise according to the
data dialog structure 300, the dialog core determines that that person is of interest, instep 512. If the person is not of interest, the process proceeds “NO” to theend operation 518. However, if the person is of interest, thestep 512 proceeds “YES” to step 514. Instep 514, thedialog core 210 retrieves thedata dialog structure 300 and reads the dialog scripts. The dialog script will dictate how thedialog core 210 should proceed after identifying customers of interest. Thedialog core 210 can proceed within an advertising campaign according to the dialog script instep 516. Thus, the dialog script can provide instructions to the dialog core of how to compose a message to post to the social media network advertising the resource that the enterprise desires to sell. For example, the airline may advertise a very good sale price for an airline ticket to the person who may be of interest in buying airline tickets. Likewise a sale price or coupon may be sent to a person who may desire to purchase produce from the food distributor. In this way, the data dialog system is operable to assist enterprises in selling or marketing their goods that have short shelf lives or expiration dates. -
FIG. 6 illustrates a block diagram of acomputing environment 600 that may function as servers, computers, or other systems provided herein. Theenvironment 600 includes one ormore user computers user computers user computers user computers network 620 and/or displaying and navigating web pages or other types of electronic documents. Although theexemplary computer environment 600 is shown with three user computers, any number of user computers may be supported. -
Environment 700 further includes anetwork 720. Thenetwork 720 may can be any type of network familiar to those skilled in the art that can support data communications using any of a variety of commercially-available protocols, including without limitation SIP, TCP/IP, SNA, IPX, AppleTalk, and the like. Merely by way of example, thenetwork 720 maybe a local area network (“LAN”), such as an Ethernet network, a Token-Ring network and/or the like; a wide-area network; a virtual network, including without limitation a virtual private network (“VPN”); the Internet; an intranet; an extranet; a public switched telephone network (“PSTN”); an infra-red network; a wireless network (e.g., a network operating under any of the IEEE 802.11 suite of protocols, the Bluetooth™ protocol known in the art, and/or any other wireless protocol); and/or any combination of these and/or other networks. - The system may also include one or
more server server 725 is shown as a web server andserver 730 is shown as an application server. Theweb server 725, which may be used to process requests for web pages or other electronic documents fromuser computers web server 725 can be running an operating system including any of those discussed above, as well as any commercially-available server operating systems. Theweb server 725 can also run a variety of server applications, including SIP servers, HTTP servers, FTP servers, CGI servers, database servers, Java servers, and the like. In some instances, theweb server 725 may publish operations available operations as one or more web services. - The
environment 700 may also include one or more file and or/application servers 730, which can, in addition to an operating system, include one or more applications accessible by a client running on one or more of theuser computers user computers server user computer 705. - The web pages created by the
server 725 and/or 730 may be forwarded to auser computer 705 via a web (file)server web server 725 may be able to receive web page requests, web services invocations, and/or input data from auser computer 705 and can forward the web page requests and/or input data to the web (application)server 730. In further embodiments, theweb server 730 may function as a file server. Although for ease of description,FIG. 6 illustrates aseparate web server 725 and file/application server 730, those skilled in the art will recognize that the functions described with respect toservers computer systems server 725 and/or web (application)server 730 may function as the system, devices, or components described inFIGS. 1-3 . - The
environment 700 may also include adatabase 735. Thedatabase 735 may reside in a variety of locations. By way of example,database 735 may reside on a storage medium local to (and/or resident in) one or more of thecomputers computers database 735 may reside in a storage-area network (“SAN”) familiar to those skilled in the art. Similarly, any necessary files for performing the functions attributed to thecomputers database 735 may be a relational database, such as Oracle 10i™, that is adapted to store, update, and retrieve data in response to SQL-formatted commands. -
FIG. 7 illustrates one embodiment of acomputer system 700 upon which the servers, computers, or other systems or components described herein may be deployed or executed. Thecomputer system 700 is shown comprising hardware elements that may be electrically coupled via abus 755. The hardware elements may include one or more central processing units (CPUs) 705; one or more input devices 710 (e.g., a mouse, a keyboard, etc.); and one or more output devices 715 (e.g., a display device, a printer, etc.). Thecomputer system 700 may also include one ormore storage devices 720. By way of example, storage device(s) 720 may be disk drives, optical storage devices, solid-state storage devices such as a random access memory (“RAM”) and/or a read-only memory (“ROM”), which can be programmable, flash-updateable and/or the like. - The
computer system 700 may additionally include a computer-readablestorage media reader 725; a communications system 730 (e.g., a modem, a network card (wireless or wired), an infra-red communication device, etc.); and workingmemory 740, which may include RAM and ROM devices as described above. Thecomputer system 700 may also include aprocessing acceleration unit 735, which can include a DSP, a special-purpose processor, and/or the like. - The computer-readable
storage media reader 725 can further be connected to a computer-readable storage medium, together (and, optionally, in combination with storage device(s) 720) comprehensively representing remote, local, fixed, and/or removable storage devices plus storage media for temporarily and/or more permanently containing computer-readable information. Thecommunications system 730 may permit data to be exchanged with the network 720 (FIG. 7 ) and/or any other computer described above with respect to thecomputer system 700. Moreover, as disclosed herein, the term “storage medium” may represent one or more devices for storing data, including read only memory (ROM), random access memory (RAM), magnetic RAM, core memory, magnetic disk storage mediums, optical storage mediums, flash memory devices and/or other machine readable mediums for storing information. - The
computer system 700 may also comprise software elements, shown as being currently located within a workingmemory 740, including anoperating system 745 and/orother code 750. It should be appreciated that alternate embodiments of acomputer system 700 may have numerous variations from that described above. For example, customized hardware might also be used and/or particular elements might be implemented in hardware, software (including portable software, such as applets), or both. Further, connection to other computing devices such as network input/output devices may be employed. - In the foregoing description, for the purposes of illustration, methods were described in a particular order. It should be appreciated that in alternate embodiments, the methods may be performed in a different order than that described. It should also be appreciated that the methods described above may be performed by hardware components or may be embodied in sequences of machine-executable instructions, which may be used to cause a machine, such as a general-purpose or special-purpose processor or logic circuits programmed with the instructions to perform the methods. These machine-executable instructions may be stored on one or more machine readable mediums, such as CD-ROMs or other type of optical disks, floppy diskettes, ROMs, RAMs, EPROMs, EEPROMs, magnetic or optical cards, flash memory, or other types of machine-readable mediums suitable for storing electronic instructions. Alternatively, the methods may be performed by a combination of hardware and software.
- Specific details were given in the description to provide a thorough understanding of the embodiments. However, it will be understood by one of ordinary skill in the art that the embodiments may be practiced without these specific details. For example, circuits may be shown in block diagrams in order not to obscure the embodiments in unnecessary detail. In other instances, well-known circuits, processes, algorithms, structures, and techniques may be shown without unnecessary detail in order to avoid obscuring the embodiments.
- Also, it is noted that the embodiments were described as a process which is depicted as a flowchart, a flow diagram, a data flow diagram, a structure diagram, or a block diagram. Although a flowchart may describe the operations as a sequential process, many of the operations can be performed in parallel or concurrently. In addition, the order of the operations may be re-arranged. A process is terminated when its operations are completed, but could have additional steps not included in the figure. A process may correspond to a method, a function, a procedure, a subroutine, a subprogram, etc. When a process corresponds to a function, its termination corresponds to a return of the function to the calling function or the main function.
- Furthermore, embodiments may be implemented by hardware, software, firmware, middleware, microcode, hardware description languages, or any combination thereof. When implemented in software, firmware, middleware or microcode, the program code or code segments to perform the necessary tasks may be stored in a machine readable medium such as storage medium. A processor(s) may perform the necessary tasks. A code segment may represent a procedure, a function, a subprogram, a program, a routine, a subroutine, a module, a software package, a class, or any combination of instructions, data structures, or program statements. A code segment may be coupled to another code segment or a hardware circuit by passing and/or receiving information, data, arguments, parameters, or memory contents. Information, arguments, parameters, data, etc. may be passed, forwarded, or transmitted via any suitable means including memory sharing, message passing, token passing, network transmission, etc.
- While illustrative embodiments of the invention have been described in detail herein, it is to be understood that the inventive concepts may be otherwise variously embodied and employed, and that the appended claims are intended to be construed to include such variations, except as limited by the prior art.
Claims (20)
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US20110125550A1 (en) | 2011-05-26 |
GB2479825A (en) | 2011-10-26 |
US20110125697A1 (en) | 2011-05-26 |
GB201106592D0 (en) | 2011-06-01 |
US8331550B2 (en) | 2012-12-11 |
DE102011017442A1 (en) | 2011-11-24 |
US20110123015A1 (en) | 2011-05-26 |
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