Patent Document ID: 8391464
Application ID: 12803314

Base Claim:
1. A method, performed by an IVR system, for responding to users' queries while minimizing agent cost, the method comprising: receiving a call from a user at an IVR system; receiving a request from the user to speak with a live agent; offering the user an option to have the IVR system contact the user at a later time; in response to the user accepting such option, asking the user to state his query; recording the user's speech input for the query; terminating the call with the user, wherein after the call is terminated and while the user is offline, performing the following: providing the user's query to a natural language understanding interpreter; receiving a natural language interpretation result; and using the natural language interpretation result, determining if the user's query matches a query in a database that includes frequently-asked queries and corresponding response protocols; in response to the user's query matching a query in the database, providing an automated response to the user in accordance with a predetermined response protocol for the query; and in response to being unable to match the user's query to a query in the database, requesting a response to the query from a live agent and sending the live agent's response to the user in an automated manner.

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Claim 10:
10. The method of claim 1 , wherein the response protocol identifies any information needed to respond to the query and, if the IVR system does not have all such information, the IVR system's initial response to the user is to request more information from the user.