UK Company Granted Patent for Technology That Pulls Social Media Data into Contact Center

Waves of information, articles and blogs have been written about the subject of using social media in the contact center. We know why it's important: customers often reveal information about their relationships with you – either good or bad – in their Facebook posts, Google (News - Alert)+ sharing, Tweets and comments on message boards and blogs.

A whole host of information is there, if you just knew how to mine for it. It's also important be on top of social media, because one strong post – “Acme Corporation Stinks Worse Than Rotten Cabbage!!!!” – can be seen by hundreds, if not thousands of eyes, many belonging to people who value the original poster's opinions and experiences.

So there's the why.

But there's been a lot less written about the how, which is always the trickier part. It's not enough to have the information in a database somewhere. It's not even enough to have it buried in a customer file. It's your contact center that faces your customers every day, and if they don't both have the information and have a way to use it, you've wasted a lot of time and money mining it.

A U.K. company called NewVoiceMedia (News - Alert) recently received a patent for a new technology that the company says will take caller data and execute a search query using internal data repositories and external resources such as Google or Microsoft (News - Alert) Bing. The subsequent results, attained in real-time, can then be delivered as targeted information to the agent on the call, said the company in a news release.

Basingstoke, England-based NewVoiceMedia, which builds cloud-based contact center solutions, notes that rather than having to attain information directly from each social media source individually, the technology makes use of search engines as a main pipeline for relevant data. The social media feature will be integrated into the company's existing cloud-based call center solution.

Richard Pickering, founder of NewVoiceMedia, said, “This new patent award will soon enable us to integrate real-time search as part and parcel of our true cloud contact center product, ContactWorld. This integration of search engine capabilities with existing contact center technologies such as IVR and CRM databases will enable our customers’ agents to quickly access huge amounts of callers’ data from internal databases and the Internet.”

While “huge amounts of data” can be a curse to many contact centers who don't have the knowledge, the time or the means to make use of it, a contact center platform that can find that data, make sense of it and deliver it to agent at the right time will help many companies get their hands around social media and find a place for it in the management of their customer relationships.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.

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