Abstract:
A technique is taught that improves how an organization engages with customers. In an embodiment, keywords are discovered to optimize for, and to integrate with, advertising systems to advertise a company website. A set of advertisements is created that improve the click-through rate from users. A optimized landing page experience is created to provide a best user experience to drive issue resolution and sales.

Description:
CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS 
       [0001]    This application claims priority to provisional patent application Ser. No. 61/479,809, filed Apr. 27, 2011, which application is incorporated herein in its entirety by this reference thereto. 
     
    
     BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 
       [0002]    1. Technical Field 
         [0003]    The invention relates to customer relationship management. More particularly, the invention relates to enhancing the customer&#39;s experience when resolving issues that relate to a product or a service on the Internet. 
         [0004]    2. Description of the Background Art 
         [0005]    Currently, when a customer of a company faces any issues with respect to a service or a product, the customer typically contacts customer service representatives of the company, either by phone, chat, or any other available media. The customer service representatives attempt to solve the customer&#39;s issues by spending time to understand these issues, offering appropriate solutions, and so on. 
         [0006]    In many cases, the solution to the customer&#39;s issue is quite common and the issue, along with the solution to the issue, may be available on the website of the company. This may result in the customer service representative wasting time and spending effort in solving an issue, which the customer may have been able to solve himself by using the information on the Internet or on the website of the company. 
         [0007]    In cases, where the customer searches for a solution to the issue using a search engine, the appropriate page on the company&#39;s website may not be immediately visible to the customer because it may not appear among the first few results in the search engine. This leads to a situation where the customer is unable to find a solution to his issue on the Internet and, therefore, contacts the customer care representative using more expensive means, such as voice. 
         [0008]    The customer may not be able to view the correct solution due to a lack of adequate steps taken by the company to ensure that the solution is accessible to the customer on the Web. The company may not be aware that customers are facing issues in a particular area and, hence, does not make the related page sufficiently prominent to grab the attention of the customer. The company may also not have optimized the related Web page for visibility to search engines. 
         [0009]    Further, the company may be relying on traditional media, such as telephone-based customer service representatives, to assist customers, and makes no effort to provide the related information on the Web, either on the company website or on some other related website. For example, in relation to servicing a technical product, it may be better to have generic FAQs listed on the website, so that customers can read about commonly faced issues. 
         [0010]    For specific technical issues, a chat service may be provided for online support where a customer service representative goes through the issue with the customer and provides necessary support services to the resolve the issues that the customer is facing. 
         [0011]    Therefore, the level of service offered may be dependent on the level of involvement required from the customer service representatives. Companies cannot afford to resolve all issues by engaging with the customers directly. At the same time, there are certain issues that can be resolved by engaging with a customer either through a chat or over a telephone call or similar means. Therefore, it is important for companies to have the right mix of means to address the various kinds of issues faced by their customers. 
       SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION 
       [0012]    Embodiments of the invention provide a method and apparatus for discovering keywords to optimize for, and to recommend, the optimizations needed on a company website to improve the visibility of the website during customer searches, where such searches are any of an external search and an internal search. 
         [0013]    Embodiments of the invention also provide a method and apparatus for discovering keywords to optimize for, and to integrate with, a company&#39;s advertising systems to advertise the website with the intent of creating awareness and increasing visibility of, and driving traffic to, the website. Embodiments of the invention also optimize for the right tactic and the right bid to enable the website to be prominent among search related advertisements. 
         [0014]    Embodiments of the invention also provide a method and apparatus for creating the right set of advertisements to improve customer click-through, and thus serve the needs of the customer by resolving issues faced by the customer and/or providing information about a product/service to the customer. Embodiments of the invention also provide a method and apparatus that creates multiple versions of advertisements to test the efficacy of the advertisements and improve the advertisements based on the efficacy of the advertisements. 
         [0015]    Embodiments of the invention also provide a method and apparatus for creating the right landing page experience when a customer clicks through the ads/search, and to optimize for the right customer experience to drive resolution/sales. Embodiments of the invention also provide a method and apparatus for offering additional services, such as assisted self-service and/or chat, from the landing pages. Embodiments of the invention also provide a method and apparatus for customization of the landing page experience for different customers based on various parameters, such as geographic location of the customer, intent as expressed by the keyword, etc. 
     
    
     
       BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS 
         [0016]      FIG. 1  is a block schematic diagram showing a system for enhancing the customer service experience according to the invention; 
           [0017]      FIG. 2  is a flow diagram showing a method for enhancing the customer service experience according to the invention; 
           [0018]      FIG. 3  is a flow diagram showing an example of a primary issue line identification according to the invention; 
           [0019]      FIG. 4  is a flow diagram showing a further example of a primary line issue line identification according to the invention; 
           [0020]      FIG. 5  is a flow diagram showing a text mining technique according to the invention; 
           [0021]      FIG. 6  is a flow diagram showing a method for identifying keywords according to the invention; and 
           [0022]      FIG. 7  is a block schematic diagram showing a machine in the exemplary form of a computer system within which a set of instructions for causing the machine to perform any of the herein disclosed embodiments of the invention may be executed. 
       
    
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION 
       [0023]    The embodiments herein disclose a method and apparatus for enabling a company/organization to engage with customers/users. 
         [0024]      FIG. 1  depicts a system, according to embodiments as disclosed herein, that comprises of a text database  101 , an extraction and analysis engine  102 , a recommendation engine  103 , an integration engine  104 , an advertisement server  105 , and a Web server  106 . 
         [0025]    In an embodiment, the text database  101  contains information that is in a text format. The information is collected from a plurality of sources  108  including, but not limited to, chat conversations between customer service representatives and customers, customer management data, social media interactions, transcripts of voice conversations between customer service representatives and customers, search terms used on search engines, search terms used on the website of companies, Web logs maintained by a website, forum postings related to the companies, electronic mails sent by the customers related to the company, blogs, and/or any other text related to information that is of interest to the customers. 
         [0026]    The advertisement server  105  comprises one or more servers which host Web advertisements. The advertisements are served to a customer when a customer is viewing a page by the advertisement server  105  on the basis of the type of page being viewed by the customer. In other embodiments, the advertisements are also served to the customer when the customer is performing a search using a particular keyword, where the displayed advertisement depends on the keyword used by the customer. The advertisement server  105  also enables a bidding process for the advertisements, where multiple bidders may bid for the right to display their advertisement for a keyword that is used by a customer when performing a search. 
         [0027]    The extraction and analysis engine  102  fetches text from the text database  101 . The extraction and analysis engine  102  analyzes the text and identifies issues faced by the customer. The issues identified are typically the most common issues that are of concern to, or raised by, the customer, which issues are identified during customer activities, such as contacting the customer service representative, making searches, posting in forums, blogs, and so on. 
         [0028]    The extraction and analysis engine  102  identifies keywords associated with the issues faced by the customer. The keywords are identified from the text and identifying words and terms used by the customer for describing the problem. In other embodiments, the keywords are also identified on the basis of the words and terms used while attempting to solve the issues faced by the customer, e.g. by the customer service representative, participants in a forum and so on. The identified keywords are, for example, in the form of keywords or phrases. Keywords are identified based on a text mining issue categorization solution that mines chat transcripts, voice transcripts, forum logs, blogs, etc. The essential logic of such solution concerns the way in which a customer talks about an issue in one or more channels provides the phrases that are likely to be the phrases that they customer uses for a search as well. An embodiment of the invention uses the algorithm shown in  FIGS. 3-5  for this purpose. 
         [0029]    The recommendation engine  103  receives the keywords from the extraction and analysis engine  102 . In an embodiment, the recommendation engine  103  connects to the Internet and runs searches for each of the received keywords. The searches are run, for example, using a suitable search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and so on. In an embodiment, the searches are also run on the website of a company, where the website has a search engine for searches on that website. This search does not necessarily require an algorithm. Rather, embodiment of the invention use a software system that automatically runs the search, e.g. through well known, published APIs of the search engines that are used. The idea here is to do regular search. 
         [0030]    The results are analyzed through automated mechanisms, e.g. some form of text matching, to check the ranking of the Web page of the company which offers the solution to the issue, as laid out by the used keywords. If the ranking of the Web page is low, i.e. the Web page is not among the first few results, the recommendation engine  103  analyzes the Web page in the context of the keywords and the search engine results and provides recommendations on how to optimize the Web page increase the visibility of the Web page during searches, typically by examining usage of the keywords in the content of the Web pages and then increase the overall content in the website for these significant keywords. 
         [0031]    The recommendation engine  103  repeats the above mentioned process for each of the keywords received from the extraction and analysis engine  102 . In an embodiment, the recommendation engine  103  also provides multiple recommendations for a particular keyword. In another embodiment, the recommendation engine  103  also modifies the Web page in the Web server as per the recommendations. The recommendation engine  103  typically presents the recommendations on a suitable display. 
         [0032]    The integration engine  104  receives the keywords from the extraction and analysis engine  102 . The integration engine  104  analyzes the keywords and discovers the appropriate catchphrases for purposes of bringing the appropriate Web pages belonging to the company to the notice of the customer. See below. In an embodiment, the appropriate Web pages are brought to the notice of the customer using appropriate advertisements, which are inserted into Web pages, where the Web pages are the result pages in search engines. In an embodiment, this is done by participating in the search engine advertising (marketplace). There are the systems for this purpose offered by companies, such as Google® (Adwords®) and Microsoft® (AdCenter®). 
         [0033]    The customers view the advertisement on performing a search with the specified catchphrases and view the appropriate Web page by clicking on the advertisement. The integration engine  104 , in conjunction with at least one advertisement server  105 , also decides on bids to be placed with the advertisement server  105 , so that the advertisement for the Web page comes among the first few results when a customer enters the catchphrase or a phrase similar to the catchphrase. In an embodiment, the price of the bid is calculated on the amount that a client is willing to spend to resolve the specific issues represented through the keyword. Overall, the cost of acquiring and servicing the customer online should be lower than what it would be for servicing the same customer through the voice channel, hence delivering value. 
         [0034]    The integration engine  104  deploys the advertisement with the help of the advertisement server  105  and the Web server  106 . The integration engine  104  also monitors the number of clicks generated from each deployed advertisement. In an embodiment, the integration engine  104  also provides multiple catchphrases for the same keyword and deploys multiple advertisements, based on the provided multiple catchphrases. The integration engine  104  monitors the number of clicks generated from each deployed advertisement and modifies or removes certain advertisements, depending on the number of clicks generated from each deployed advertisement. In an embodiment, the system collects the data associated with the number of times the ads were clicked and, hence, the Web pages visited as directed by the ads. The Web pages, i.e. landing pages for the ads, are instrumented to collect the required data and analyzed subsequently. 
         [0035]    The optimization engine  107  receives the keywords from the extraction and analysis engine  102 . The optimization engine  107  optimizes the Web page to make it easy for the customer to view solutions to their queries. See below. In an embodiment, the optimization engine  107  also modifies the Web page to offer additional issue solving techniques, such as chat, assisted self service, and so on, to assist the customer. The optimization engine  107  also modifies the Web page on a per-user basis. The modifications are based on a plurality of factors comprising, for example, geographic location of the end user and intent of the user, which are deduced from the keyword used by the customer. 
         [0036]      FIG. 2  is a flowchart showing a method for enhancing the customer service experience according to an embodiment of the invention. The extraction and analysis engine  102  fetches ( 201 ) text from the text database  101 . The extraction and analysis engine  102  identifies ( 202 ) relevant keywords associated with the issues faced by the customer by analyzing the text and identifying issues faced by the customer which are identified, for example, from the text and identifying words and terms used by the customer for describing the problem e.g. using text mining and extraction, as described above in connection with  FIGS. 3-5 . 
         [0037]    The keywords are also identified on the basis of the words and terms used while attempting to solve the issues faced by the customer, for example, by the customer service representative, participants in a forum, and so on. In an embodiment, the identified keywords are in the form of keywords or phrases. The recommendation engine  103  enhances ( 203 ) the visibility of the page to search engines using the relevant keywords sent by the extraction and analysis engine  102 . See below. The recommendation engine  103  provides recommendations on how to optimize the Web page to increase the visibility of the Web page to search engines. In an embodiment, the recommendation engine  103  also modifies the Web page in the Web server as per the recommendations, for example through ads (see below). 
         [0038]    The integration engine  104  suggests ( 204 ) appropriate advertisements for insertion into the search result pages on search engines using the relevant keywords sent by the extraction and analysis engine  102 . The integration engine  104  analyzes the keywords and discovers the appropriate catchphrases for purposes of bringing the appropriate Web pages belonging to the company to the notice of the customer by inserting appropriate advertisements. 
         [0039]    The integration engine  104 , in conjunction with at least one advertisement server  105 , also decides on bids to be placed with the advertisement server  105 , so that the advertisement for the Web page is provided among the first few results, thus enhancing the visibility of the page when a customer enters the catchphrase or a phrase similar to the catchphrase, e.g. by leveraging the mechanisms exposed by the advertising systems. 
         [0040]    The optimization engine  107  optimizes ( 205 ) the Web page to make it easy for the customer to view solutions to their queries easily, for example by exploring different mechanisms of presenting the information to the end user and by leveraging historical data of performance of various presentations. 
         [0041]    The optimization engine  107  also modifies ( 206 ) the Web page to offer additional issue solving techniques, such as chat, assisted self service, and so on to assist the customer. The recommendation engine  103  enhances ( 207 ) the visibility of the page during searches conducted only on the Web site by using the relevant keywords sent by the extraction and analysis engine  102 . 
         [0042]    In an embodiment, Steps  203 - 207  are performed simultaneously, one after the other. Steps  203 - 207  may also be performed one after the other, with no mandatory order of steps being followed. A combination of one or more steps from  203 - 207  may also be performed. The various actions in method  200  may be performed in the order presented, in a different order, or simultaneously. Further, in some embodiments, some actions listed in  FIG. 2  may be omitted. 
         [0043]      FIG. 3  is a flow diagram showing an example of a primary issue line identification according to the invention. 
         [0044]      FIG. 4  is a flow diagram showing a further example of a primary line issue line identification according to the invention. 
         [0045]      FIG. 5  is a flow diagram showing a text mining technique according to the invention. 
         [0046]      FIG. 6  depicts a process for identifying keywords according to an embodiment of the invention. The extraction and analysis engine  102  analyzes ( 301 ) the textual information fetched from the text database  101 . From the textual information, the extraction and analysis engine  102  identifies ( 302 ) key issues faced by the customer (see  FIGS. 3-5  and the discussion thereof above, for example) The issues identified are typically the most common issues raised the customer, for example, when contacting the customer service representative, making searches, posting in forums and blogs, and so on. 
         [0047]    In an embodiment, the extraction and analysis engine  102  also considers the frequency of occurrence of these key issues by looking at the frequency of occurrence of the relevant text. The extraction and analysis engine  102  extracts ( 303 ) text related to the issues from the textual information and identifies ( 304 ) words associated with those issues. The extraction and analysis engine  102  then identifies ( 305 ) the keywords using the associated words. 
         [0048]    The various actions in method  300  may be performed in the order presented, in a different order, or simultaneously. Further, in some embodiments, some actions listed in  FIG. 6  may be omitted. 
         [0049]    Embodiments as disclosed above are explained using customer service as an example. It may be obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to use the embodiments as disclosed above in any scenario where the company/organization wants to engage with a customer/user, such as where a prospective customer is looking to purchase a specific product/service. 
         [0050]      FIG. 7  is a block schematic diagram showing a machine in the exemplary form of a computer system  1600  within which a set of instructions for causing the machine to perform any of the herein disclosed techniques may be executed. In alternative embodiments, the machine may comprise or include a network router, a network switch, a network bridge, personal digital assistant (PDA), a cellular telephone, a Web appliance or any machine capable of executing or transmitting a sequence of instructions that specify actions to be taken. 
         [0051]    The computer system  1600  includes a processor  1602 , a main memory  1604  and a static memory  1606 , which communicate with each other via a bus  1608 . The computer system  1600  may further include a display unit  1610 , for example, a liquid crystal display (LCD) or a cathode ray tube (CRT). The computer system  1600  also includes an alphanumeric input device  1612 , for example, a keyboard; a cursor control device  1614 , for example, a mouse; a disk drive unit  1616 , a signal generation device  1618 , for example, a speaker, and a network interface device  1628 . 
         [0052]    The disk drive unit  1616  includes a machine-readable medium  1624  on which is stored a set of executable instructions, i.e., software,  1626  embodying any one, or all, of the methodologies described herein below. The software  1626  is also shown to reside, completely or at least partially, within the main memory  1604  and/or within the processor  1602 . The software  1626  may further be transmitted or received over a network  1630  by means of a network interface device  1628 . 
         [0053]    In contrast to the system  1600  discussed above, a different embodiment uses logic circuitry instead of computer-executed instructions to implement processing entities. Depending upon the particular requirements of the application in the areas of speed, expense, tooling costs, and the like, this logic may be implemented by constructing an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) having thousands of tiny integrated transistors. Such an ASIC may be implemented with CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), TTL (transistor-transistor logic), VLSI (very large systems integration), or another suitable construction. Other alternatives include a digital signal processing chip (DSP), discrete circuitry (such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, inductors, and transistors), field programmable gate array (FPGA), programmable logic array (PLA), programmable logic device (PLD), and the like. 
         [0054]    It is to be understood that embodiments may be used as or to support software programs or software modules executed upon some form of processing core (such as the CPU of a computer) or otherwise implemented or realized upon or within a machine or computer readable medium. A machine-readable medium includes any mechanism for storing or transmitting information in a form readable by a machine, e.g. a computer. For example, a machine readable medium includes read-only memory (ROM); random access memory (RAM); magnetic disk storage media; optical storage media; flash memory devices; electrical, optical, acoustical or other form of propagated signals, for example, carrier waves, infrared signals, digital signals, etc.; or any other type of media suitable for storing or transmitting information. 
         [0055]    Although the invention is described herein with reference to preferred embodiments, one skilled in the art will readily appreciate that other applications may be substituted for those set forth herein without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Accordingly, the invention should only be limited by the Claims included below.