Presence based open contact center leveraging social networks

Abstract

In recent years, adoption of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc have witnessed a meteoric rise amongst users across the world. Much of this is due to such platforms' capability to create a community of users who are able to communicate updates in real-time and keep in constant touch with each other. Social networks are also enabling the delivery of a host of services irrespective of the user devices and the services delivered. Hence, social networks have drawn the attention of businesses and enterprises for various purposes such as new products advertising, trend mining, connecting to customers. This paper demonstrates how social networks can be used to create business entities like contact centers. In contrast to current day contact centers, where a user must visit a company' s web-site to engage in live-chat or call a 1-800 number, social networks offer a real-time channel to enable companies to reach individual users through a medium of their choice and at a time of their choosing. Rather than requiring customers to visit a company' s website, companies are now able to interact with the customers where customers are already spending time, and can tailor the customer experience as a 1-on-1 channel for personalized, real-time interaction. A presence based open contact center system (POCC) is presented in this paper. In the proposed system, presence of a customer i.e. the availability of a customer on social media is detected and then based on the capabilities of the social network, a real-time communication channel such as live-chat is established between an agent and the customer. The core components of the POCC are implemented using industry standard SIP protocol. The architecture of the POCC is flexible such that adding a new social network service is only a matter of writing a service specific adapter that can be easily plugged into the POCC. © 2013 IFIP.