Consumers can be targeted with advertising where the advertisements are selected and served in part due to some information that is known about the consumer or consumer group that will receive the ads. In digital advertising, advertisements can be sent on an opt-in basis meaning that the advertising is presented to consumers that may take an option of interacting with the ad, if interactive, or at least contacting the advertiser to engage further in the process of an advertisement leading to some transaction.
In association with the following detailed description, reference is made to the accompanying drawings, where like numerals in different figures can refer to the same element.
With the growth of the Internet network, electronic advertising, including email advertising and web page advertising, e.g., Internet search result page advertising, mobile advertising, text-based advertising, streaming TV/movie/media advertising, etc., have become vehicles for opt-in advertising and/or drive follow-up from the consumer into the organization through a variety of contact channels. Targeting methods for electronic advertising include targeting consumers based on search keyword, on-line user behavior, navigation history, profile information, likes or dislikes, survey response, GPS coordinates, etc. For electronic advertising, a consumer receiving the advertisement may interact with it to initiate a process which represents the goal of the advertisement, e.g., a sale to a consumer of a service or a product.
For purposes of explanation, the term contact center is used to refer to the contact point within the enterprise or organization that is interacting with the prospect or customer. The embodiments are not restricted to traditional contact center agents. The contact point can also include situations such as a representative in a branch, store, back office, home-based worker, field worker, outsourcer, and/or virtual agents or other forms of self-service automation, etc. Any point of contact is possible. For example, a customer experience platform (CXP) responsible for tracking and managing customer interactions is aware of that enterprise point of contact. Also, an agent is an agent of a contact center, point of contact or other enterprise representative.
A demand-side platform 108 allows marketers on market side computers 110a, b, n to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange 112 accounts through an application programming interface (API). Publishers 114a, b, n of ad networks 116a, b, n make requests for bids and retrieve the impressions 104 from the ad exchange 112 to send the impressions 104 to the audience computers 106a, b, n. A publisher 114a, b, n and ad network 116a, b, n can include a search engine provider, e.g. YAHOO, or other publisher. An exemplary ad exchange 112 is the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Real-time bidding for display of the impressions 104 online can take place within the ad exchanges 112. By utilizing the demand side platform 108, the publishers 114a, b, n can manage their bid requests for the available advertising space and the pricing for the impressions 104, and the market side computers 110a, b, n can manage the advertisements that they are layering on to the website to target the audiences of the audience computers 106a, b, n. The market side computers 110a, b, n can perform various functions including design of marketing advertisements campaigns and arbitration of advertisement assignments to publishers, e.g., automated, based on rules. Logic for arbitration can include determining an actual current presence of end users and pricing. If the impression 104 includes an option for a communication with the representative 206, e.g., a chat or a call, then pacing can be implemented. Pacing is related to hit rate, e.g., percentage of accepted offers, which may vary across publishers 114a, b, n, and can depend on further parameters including time of day, season, etc., as described below. The winning bid from the market side computers 110a, b, n gets its impression 104 displayed.
For example, the impression 104 may include contact information 202 so that the audience can use a communication device 204 to connect over a network 210 with an agent 206 at a contact center 208. The communication device 204 can include a mobile phone, a landline phone, a computer, etc. The network 210 can include a public switched telephone network (PSTN), including for example, telephone lines, fiber optic cables, microwave transmission links, cellular networks, communications satellites, undersea telephone cables, etc., interconnected by switching centers, and/or a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), e.g., the Internet, a city area network (CAN), a metropolitan area network (MAN), etc.
The enterprise may be over-advertising or under-advertising and thus driving inappropriate volumes of prospect or customer interactions into their contact center 208, or other customer-facing resources, when there are not the right skilled resources available to handle those sales or service inquiries driven by the impressions 104 that have been purchased and displayed. In can be better for the digital ad purchases to take into account the availability of correctly skilled agents 206 to engage the audience, answer questions, and close a sale. One scenario can be oriented towards ensuring a right-skilled agent 206 is available when a dynamic chat or web callback session is offered. Other scenarios are possible. For example, the interaction can start with chat, and then a voice channel is added, or vice versa. The dynamic web invitations are presented on the enterprise's own website, after the customer may have already landed on this site from some other website source. Other scenarios for ad purchases try to generate as much traffic as possible, in hopes of creating the best percentage and widest funnel of impression click through rate (CTR) to ensure the highest number of potential sales. It may be preferable to ensure that enough right skilled resources are available to connect with the audience, e.g., by matching agent skill availability and/or skill level at the contact center 208 with the ad-spend. This can be particularly true for high-value, high complexity, high advertising sales-cost sales where an available, expert agent can increase the chances of closing a sale based on the advertised product or service. What is described herein, is an ability to target ad impressions/purchases based on supply-side skilled resource availability, e.g., availability of skilled mortgage loan specialists, to improve on the way that some ad impression/purchase processes reference supply-side stock inventory availability, e.g., availability of number of particular type of widgets that can be sold.
The audience computer 106a, b, n can be used to select, e.g., click on, the impression 104 in the search results and be directed to a website of the seller enterprise. The website can encourage the audience to reach out to the contact center, e.g., “Agent waiting by to help you!,” by dialing the provided phone number. Alternatively, the website can encourage the audience to reach out by displaying the call number or chat link in the impression 104, without the audience 106a, b, n having to click it. For each impression 104, data 315 can be collected about search that leads to the impression 104 to be served, and the click through seller (CTS) data associated with the route identification (ID) (320). Additionally or alternatively, the audience computer 106a, b, n can be provided with a web browser link to connect with the agent 206 of the contact center 208. For example, WebRTC provides web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple JavaScript APIs. The WebRTC route ID information can be collected from the browser (330). The route ID and data from the search and CTS can be stored in a database, e.g., a local or remote database or distributed databases, and/or the cloud 335. Collected data 315 can include search information, e.g., about the type of product or service, profile information, e.g., audience ID, level of service, and type of audience, and context information, e.g., location of the audience member, time of the contact, etc.
The call or web browser communication along with the collected data 315 is sent to and/or accessed by the contact center 208 (340). At the contact center 208, a customer relationship management (CRM) system and/or a Customer Experience Platform (CXP) 344, an example of which is a GENESYS Customer Experience Platform for managing customer interactions, possibly further enhanced with a GENESYS Conversation Manager capabilities such as context services and business rules, can be used to manage the contact center interactions with the customer. Other platforms can be used. The CRM and/or CXP 344 organizes, automates and synchronizes sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. Calls and browser interactions are answered by the agent 206 or placed in a queue to wait for a next available agent. A service window 346 can display the queue to the agent 206. The impression can be attributed, for example, based on a reserved dialed number identification service (DNIS) associated with the impression 104 for a call (which may be a full phone number DNIS and/or a unique extension number appended to the DNIS), and/or based on a session for a chat and/or web callback engagement via the browser or for a virtual resource (350). If the pool of reserved numbers is limited and reused in a cyclic way then additionally a timeslot for calling can be given to preserve an association with the triggering context. The agent 206 helps the customer to resolve an issue or make a purchase. When the agent 206 becomes available then the call or browser interaction is removed from the queue.
Referring also to
For example, a home buyer uses a web browser to do a keyword search for “mortgage rates.” The bank enterprise wants to display impressions 104 for its mortgage loans, but only when skilled mortgage loan officers are available to handle potential inquiries. The ad network 116a, b, n can send the audience's search information to the ad exchange 112, which coordinates with the demand side platform 108 to determine the appropriate impression 104 to display. This process may involve ad bidding based on various available, correctly skilled agents 206. The bank's contact center 208 sends the demand side platform 108 the status of its availability of mortgage-skilled agents 206, so the demand side platform 108 and ad exchange 112 can take this into account when determining whether it is a good time to present an impression 104 and/or which impression 104 to present, and/or how much to pay for the impression 104 based on agent skill level, e.g. higher skilled agent availability would indicate higher bid value.
In this way the bank or other enterprise can quickly and simply adapt their purchase/display of impressions 104 to when they have the agent skill-set and availability metric to facilitate fulfillment. A business value of purchasing/displaying impressions 104 for mortgage loans is high when there are experts available to handle direct chats or phone calls related to these products. Otherwise, a bulk advertisement purchase that does not determine what resources are available can generate customer activity that may not be efficiently captured, due to lack of skilled agent resources. In addition, for high-value items, e.g., insurance, mortgages, legal, financial services, medical, high technology, banking, e.g., where the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for advertising based on the keyword is higher than other keywords, it can be beneficial to ensure the right-skilled resource is available to support an impression 104 that is delivered to the audience computer 106a, b, n. A sale attribution regarding whether or not the sale occurred and whether the customer wants to be called back can be added to an attribution tool 360 after the purchase of the impression 104 has happened to aid with subsequent resource capacity planning and forecasting.
Advantages of serving impressions 104 based on an available and correctly skilled agent 206 can include cost savings due to reduced marketing spend on impressions 104 by the enterprise only paying for ad volume in line with available skilled agent 206 resourcing. Cost savings can also occur due to operational optimization, e.g., labor cost reduction by being able to better forecast, schedule, and utilize skilled workforce. Revenue can be improved due to higher sales closure rates, e.g., as a result of a more relevant and timely connection between the impression 104 and the interaction with a skilled agent 206 who can close the sale or deliver effective service. The customer experience can be improved and customer effort lowered. The employee experience can also be improved by being able to engage with better sales leads, and interacting with more engaged prospects and loyal customers. Deflection to competitors can also be reduced by not enticing customers to action when the correctly skilled agent 206 within the contact center 208 is not available to handle the volume of interactions.
A market processing system 402 provides digital marketing technology that offers email, web, mobile, streaming and/or other electronic/Internet based marketing campaign management tools to the market side computers 110a, b, n. A search engine marketing (SEM) platform 404 requests advertisement bids and volume, e.g., from the demand side platform 108 (412). The search engine 404 can include the ad exchange 112 of
For example, the audience computer 106a, b, n searches for a product or a service via a web browser. The search engine marketing platform 404 sends the impressions 104 to the web browser during a web search (414). In the context of a search, a search engine 409, e.g., ad networks 116a, b, n and publishers 114a, b, n of
The audience computer 106a, b, n can be used to click on the impression 104 in the search results, or otherwise engage the impression 104, and the browser is connected to a website of the enterprise. The customer can consider the product or service by viewing the website 406 (416) and/or decide to talk to the contact center agent 206 by phone (417). The website can encourage the customer to reach out to the contact center 208 with an “Agent waiting by to help you!” by dialing a phone number. A voice platform server 408 can answer the call the place the call in the queue 410 (418) to be picked by an agent 206 (420). The agent 206 can answer the call at an agent station 424 (422). The agent station can include a phone and a computer, the computer including a processor and memory. The call can be made in various media channels, including voice, chat, text, video, schedule contact/appointment, etc., both separate and combined. The call can be an inbound call from the customer to the agent 206, or an outbound call, e.g., the agent 206 initiating a call with the customer and/or returning a call to the customer.
An exemplary voice platform server 408 is a GENESYS voice platform (GVP) server. An interactive voice response (IVR) server which allows a computer to interact with during a call with the customer can be used to help answer the calls and place the calls in the queue 410, e.g., using dual tone-multi frequency (DTMF) tones input via a keypad. The voice platform server 408 answers the call and places the caller in the queue 410 and when the agent 206 becomes available then the audience member is removed from the queue 410. The agent 206 helps the customer to resolve an issue or make a purchase, etc. Alternatively, in certain scenarios the IVR may be sufficient to finish the sale, without need for a live representative 206. Since IVR resources are also limited, e.g., a number of concurrent media control platform (MCP) ports is limited, a pacing of when to place the impressions 104 can be required.
The agent station 424 can connect with the market processing system 402 to feed back call data and sales conversion data to the market processing system 402 (426). In addition to the collected data 315 described in
The market processing system 402 can utilize the fed back call data to set advertising budgets, determine a number of impressions 104 to delivery, determine where to deliver the impressions 104, etc. By targeting impressions 104 in ways that yield better results, this can improve advertisement fulfillment and cost reduction. In this way, attributes that would otherwise only be available to the contact center 208 are available to the market side computers 110a, b, n. The fed back data (426) can result in a smaller amount of unique, temporary numbers needed per advertising campaign since the market processing system 402 does not have to use a different phone number to distinguish between impressions 104. Additionally or alternatively, the contact center 208 can feed back word-of-mouth effects, e.g. customer communicating about campaign in social media, to the market processing system 402. A social media connector watching for actionable events can capture the data fed back to the market processing system 404. The fed back data can be combined with inbound marketing to try to cross-/up-sell to inbound customers who are not aware of campaigns.
The search engine 409 returns search results plus an impression 104 with an embedded WebRTC button for skilled, available agent 206 (704). The WebRTC is used for explanation purposes and other real-time communication systems can be used. The audience pushes the WebRTC button and makes a WebRTC call to the contact center 208 (705). A web gateway 724 converts the incoming call into a SIP server 726, e.g., manufactured by GENESYS COMMUNICATIONS LABORATORIES, INC., or other interface server between the telephony hardware and software at the contact center 208 (706). The SIP server 726 attaches the audience data to the call (707). The orchestration application 722 receives the call and data from the SIP server 726, attaches any additional context information related to the call to the customer relationship management (CRM) server and/or customer experience platform (CXP) 728 (708), e.g., manufactured by GENESYS COMMUNICATIONS LABORATORIES, INC., or other customer relations server, and routes the call to an agent station 424 that is logged in and available through a web services platform 728 (709). The agent station 424 includes an agent 206 that is available and skilled to handle the call. The web services platform 728 alerts an agent desktop of the call (710). The agent 206 accepts call and pulls customer record from the CRM and/or CXP 728 (711). The call disposition is sent to orchestration application (712) and the disposition can generate the conversion action in the attribution tool 360 (713). The conversion action information can be sent from the contact center 208 to the marketing processing system 402, e.g., as described in
For example, a home buyer uses a browser of an audience computer 106a, b, n to do a keyword search for “mortgage rates.” A bank enterprise wants to display impressions 104 for its mortgage loans on this audience, but only when skilled mortgage loan officers are available to handle potential inquiries. The ad network 116a, b, n sends the audience search information to an ad exchange 112, which coordinates with the demand side platform 108 to determine the appropriate impression 104 to display according to the various attributes and business rules. This process may involve ad bidding, for example. The contact center 208 for the bank sends the demand side platform 108 the status of its available mortgage-skilled agents, so the demand side platform 108 and ad exchange 112 can take this information into account when determining which impression 104 to present and/or how mush to pay for the impression 104. After the interaction with the customer, the contact center 208 can return the outcome of serving the impression 104, e.g., a sale, no sale, the potential customer will call back later, the potential customer wants to be called back later, etc. (808). Advantages include cost savings due to improved marketing attribution and improved insights can guide future advertisement spending more effectively.
This allows contact centers 208, and other customer-facing resources, to more effectively utilize available resources, applying them to the most valuable opportunity in the moment. In one implementation, when potential ad-traffic is high, other contact center interactions may be able to wait longer in queue, so that skilled agents 206 can give highest priority to ‘hot’ advertisement leads. For example, the market processing system 402 is able adjust a caller wait time based on a type of interaction, e.g., agents 206 are to prioritize the handling of calls so that there is a shorter wait time for hot leads and longer wait time for other interactions. For example, a home buyer uses a web browser of an audience computer 106a, b, n to do a keyword search for mortgage rates. A bank wants to display impressions 104 for its mortgage loans on this audience computer 106a, b, n, but only when it has skilled mortgage loan officers available to handle potential inquiries.
The impression delivery network 100 sends the audience's search information to the ad exchange 112, which coordinates with the demand side platform 108 to determine the appropriate impression 104 to display, e.g., through ad bidding, according to determined attributes and business rules. The contact center 208 for the bank sends the demand side platform 108 the status of its availability of mortgage-skilled agents, so the demand side platform 108 and ad exchange 112 can take this into account when determining which impression 104 to present. The demand side platform 108 can alert the enterprise that there is currently even higher volumes of potential mortgage prospects for this impression 104 than the contact center 208 currently has mortgage-skilled resources available to address. The contact center 208 can leverage this near-real-time impression-demand insight to adjust its current skilled resource allocation, e.g., by dynamically or manually adjusting a higher number or agents 206 to be available for mortgage-skilled interactions.
An advantage is that the contact center 208 can in near-real-time adjust the number of skilled-agents 206 currently available from a lower-value activity/skill-set to a higher-value activity/skill-set associated with the a impression 104 in order to capture this marketing opportunity. It can be beneficial to ensure the right-skilled agent 206 or other resource is available to support the impression 104 that is delivered to audience computer 106a, b, n, and that agents 206 are assigned where there is the best opportunity for connecting with a strong marketing lead. The contact center 208 can provide real-time awareness of detailed agent skill-sets and availability, and the ability to correlate near-real-time impression 104 demand with current skilled resource availability and scheduling.
For example, a home buyer uses a browser of the audience computer 106a, b, n to do a keyword search for mortgage rates. A bank wants to display impressions 104 for its mortgage loans on the audience computer 106a, b, n, but only when skilled mortgage loan officers are available to handle potential inquiries. The search engine 409 sends search information to the ad exchange 112, which coordinates with the demand side platform 108 to determine the appropriate impression 104 to display according to various attributes and business rules. The contact center 208 sends the demand side platform 108 the status of its availability of mortgage-skilled agents 206, and the demand side platform 108 and ad exchange 112 take this into account when determining which impressions 104 to present.
Based on WFM scheduling, the bank's contact center 208 takes into account that a mortgage-related interaction takes on average 15 minutes, but that all mortgage-skilled agents 206 are about to become unavailable, e.g., go on break, into a meeting, into training, end of work day, etc. within 5 minutes. Therefore, the bank's contact center 208 alerts the demand side platform 108 to suppress or delay the impression 104 purchase/display, since it determines that the contact center 208 will not have the skilled agent 206 available to meet this demand if the impression 104 were offered. Alternatively, the contact center 208 may determine based on its workforce planning that the contact center 208 will have a higher number of mortgage-skilled agents scheduled to work at an alternative time, e.g., on Monday morning, so it can notify the demand side platform 108 to purchase/display a greater number of mortgage-ad impressions during this time period. An advantage is that the right-skilled resource is available to support an advertisement that is delivered to an audience computer 106a, b, n, and that the purchase/display volumes of impressions 104 are in line with the schedule of available skilled resources.
Additionally or alternatively, staffing needed for serving the expected increase in traffic can be predicted, using similar means as WFM for traffic prediction based on history data, e.g., for same or similar campaign in the past. The demand side platform 108 can also take into account also timing, e.g., time of day, day of week, etc., which correlates with engagement ratio, e.g., hit rate, and latency of response. A required skill mix of the agents 206 can be also predicted, depending on campaign specifics. Adjustments can be made during campaign run, e.g., the WFM can adjust staffing intraday by comparing predicted and actual traffic. In addition to staffing adjustment, campaign pacing can be used to insure the skilled agent 206 is available when the impression 104 is served. Necessary information, e.g. performed staffing adjustment, can be provided to campaign management, which adjusts accordingly. Machine learning can be used for tuning models, campaign manager, traffic prediction/staffing, etc.
For example, a parent can use a web browser of the audience computer 106a, b, n to do a keyword search for “529 Plan.” A bank's contact center 208 wants to display ads for its 529 Plans on the audience computer 106a, b, n, but only if it has a knowledge management system with a robust corpus related to that topic. The search engine 409 sends the user's search information to the ad exchange 112, which coordinates with the demand side platform 108 to determine the appropriate impression 104 to display according to the various attributes and business rules. The contact center 208 sends the demand side platform 108 the status of its knowledge management corpus, so that the demand side platform 108 and ad exchange 112 can take this into account when determining which impression 104 to present to the audience computer 106a, b, n.
Additionally or alternatively, the parent's search string can be passed into the knowledge management system (1106), and the impression 104 that is presented can display the knowledge management response stating: “Answer: ‘A 529 Plan is a tax-advantaged savings plan designed to encourage saving for future college costs,’ for example, and “Next Question: connect with a 529 Specialist, or Our Website.” Therefore, the impression 104 provides a specified answer based on the keyword search term, and then engages the customer in continued dialog with the knowledge management system, a live resource, or via click-through to the enterprise's website.
The enterprise can quickly and simply adapt their ad purchase/display when they have a metric, e.g., availability of a knowledge management system with a robust corpus on a particular topic, to facilitate fulfillment. For example, a value of the impression 104 can increase when purchasing/displaying impression 104 for “529 Plans” when there is a specialized knowledge management corpus on that topic. Otherwise, a bulk impression 104 purchase that does not identify what specialized resources are available may generate customer activity that is not efficiently captured. To help manage the knowledge management corpus, the knowledge workers can be invited to handle the call or chat. This can be done through pacing of invites to knowledge workers, and keeping those who accepted for a short time in a pool of reserved knowledge workers. Queued interaction requests are matched to reserved knowledge workers. In order to not block the knowledge workers, the knowledge workers can leave the knowledge worker pool after a configurable timeout, even if no interaction was assigned. Another scenario is transfer from representative 206 to knowledge worker, e.g. a two-step or a blind transfer.
The systems and methods described above may be implemented in many different ways in many different combinations of hardware, software firmware, or any combination thereof. In one example, the systems and methods can be implemented with a processor and a memory, where the memory stores instructions, which when executed by the processor, causes the processor to perform the systems and methods. The processor may mean any type of circuit such as, but not limited to, a microprocessor, a microcontroller, a graphics processor, a digital signal processor, or another processor. The processor may also be implemented with discrete logic or components, or a combination of other types of analog or digital circuitry, combined on a single integrated circuit or distributed among multiple integrated circuits. All or part of the logic described above may be implemented as instructions for execution by the processor, controller, or other processing device and may be stored in a tangible or non-transitory machine-readable or computer-readable medium such as flash memory, random access memory (RAM) or read only memory (ROM), erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM) or other machine-readable medium such as a compact disc read only memory (CDROM), or magnetic or optical disk. A product, such as a computer program product, may include a storage medium and computer readable instructions stored on the medium, which when executed in an endpoint, computer system, or other device, cause the device to perform operations according to any of the description above. The memory can be implemented with one or more hard drives, and/or one or more drives that handle removable media, such as diskettes, compact disks (CDs), digital video disks (DVDs), flash memory keys, and other removable media.
The processing capability of the system may be distributed among multiple system components, such as among multiple processors and memories, optionally including multiple distributed processing systems. Parameters, databases, and other data structures may be separately stored and managed, may be incorporated into a single memory or database, may be logically and physically organized in many different ways, and may implemented in many ways, including data structures such as linked lists, hash tables, or implicit storage mechanisms. Programs may be parts (e.g., subroutines) of a single program, separate programs, distributed across several memories and processors, or implemented in many different ways, such as in a library, such as a shared library (e.g., a dynamic link library (DLL)). The DLL, for example, may store code that performs any of the system processing described above.
While various embodiments have been described, it can be apparent that many more embodiments and implementations are possible. Accordingly, the embodiments are not to be restricted.