FORM-2
THE PATENTS ACT, 1970
(39 of 1970)
&
THE PATENTS RULES, 2003
PROVISIONAL SPECIFICATION
(See section 10; rule 13)


PROACTIVE CUSTOMER CARE SYSTEM
TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LIMITED,
an Indian Company
of Nirmal Building, 9th Floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400 021,
Maharashtra, India.

THE FOLLOWING SPECIFICATION DESCRIBES THE INVENTION


FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to the field of customer support services.
Particularly, the present invention relates to the provision of customer support services using social networking sites.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Nowadays, social networking web sites are widely used by people all over the world. People can get together and share their thoughts and views on social networking forums. A social networking service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social networking services are web based and they provide a variety of ways for users to interact through e-mails, instant messaging services and the like.
The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school/college classmates) or which contain means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) with a linked recommendation system to generate trust. Nowadays, social networking services combine both the abovementioned types. The most commonly used social networking sites are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedln, Hi5, Tagged, Skyrock and Orkut. Many other similar sites are also available. Mobile based social networking services have also increased the participation of users towards social networking.
Due to the nature of the social networks, it is possible to get an unbiased opinion of people on any topic. The data communicated/exchanged on this


platform can be processed to extract useful information. Typically, this platform is used to appreciate or criticize various services and products which the users purchase or subscribe to. The messages about such services and products posted onto social networking sites can be automatically inspected and used to spot the desired features of products and services. Also, multiple views can be gathered on the products and services. This data can be used to analyze the market acceptance of any product. Each message posted is geo-tagged to the person who had posted it. With the help of the profile information maintained by these sites, the contact details of the person can be fetched. These details can be further used by the customer care of a company to contact that person.
Consumer acceptance of a product plays the most important role in the success of that product. The normal ways of ensuring consumer acceptance are through advertising, collecting consumer feedback, conducting surveys, maintaining customer care centers and improvising/customizing the product as per the feedback.
Commonly, for collecting feedback or for conducting a survey, a particular group of people are identified as the target audience. This process requires huge investment. Representatives of the company have to interact with this group of people and collect their views. These views form one of the criteria for further enhancement of that product.
By selecting the target audience, a subset of the consumers are addressed, but the individual concerns might still remain unaddressed. These concerns are realized when a particular individual communicates it across to the company via customer care centers. However, there is a huge possibility that


an individual with a grievance or appreciation may not contact the customer care system of the company due to lack of time or because of the fact that the grievance is very minor. (Here, the term 'company' is used to refer to all product manufacturers and service providers.) Also, there exists a possibility that this concern might be prevailing among multiple consumers. Since the grievance or appreciation is unknown to the company, it does not take any action regarding the problem and the product might suffer in the long run.
Therefore, there is a need for a proactive customer care system which:
• helps the companies to identify satisfied and unsatisfied customers;
• helps the companies to address grievances which are not reported to them by the customers directly;
• helps the companies to record appreciations to their products and services for future analysis;
• helps companies to know the opinion of a very large number of customers;
• helps companies to trace the customers very easily;
• is scalable; and
• can be realized at a very low cost.
OBJECTS OF THE INVENTION
It is an object of the present invention to provide a proactive customer care system which helps the companies to identify satisfied and unsatisfied customers.


It is another object of the present invention to provide a proactive customer care system which helps the companies to address grievances which are not reported to them by the customers directly.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a proactive customer care system which helps the companies to record appreciations to their products and services for future analysis.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide a proactive customer care system which helps companies to know the opinion of a very large number of customers.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a proactive customer care system which helps companies to trace the customers very easily.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a proactive customer care system which is scalable.
One more object of the present invention is to provide a proactive customer care system which can be realized at a very low cost,
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE ACCOMPANYING DRAWINGS
The invention will now be described with reference to the accompanying
drawing, in which:
Figure 1 illustrates the block diagram of the proactive customer care system.


DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION
The drawing and the description thereto are merely illustrative of a proactive customer care system and only exemplify the system of the invention and in no way limit the scope thereof.
The present invention relates to a proactive customer care system for different companies including product manufacturers and service providers. The system in accordance with the present invention helps the companies to identify the customers who are satisfied/ unsatisfied with their products/services from the customers' opinion on their products/services over the social networking sites. It will further help the company personnel to contact the grieved person and address the problem as needed. The companies get alerted of all the discussions about their product only after due privacy clearances. The customer care systems of the companies are given the contact details of the customers to address their grievances. Location details are also given along with contact details. Further, the present invention will help the companies to record the appreciations on their products/services for future reference, analysis and rating of the products/services.
Referring to the accompanying drawing, Figure 1 illustrates the block diagram of the proactive customer care system indicated generally by the reference numeral 100. The main components of the system 100 are an opinion search module 30 which searches the social networking sites 20 of the companies' customers 10 for their opinion on the companies' products/services, a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration ) server 40 and a customer care module 50. The opinion search module 30 has a post reader


module 31, a search engine 32, and an NLP (Natural Language Processing) engine 33. The customer care module 50 has a packet receiver module 51 and a personnel interface module 52.
The customers 10 publish different types of information which may contain any opinion on their purchased products/services in the social networking sites 20 which they are subscribed to. The messages on these social networking sites 20 are inspected by the post reader module 31 in the opinion search module 30 to identify if the company's product is being discussed. These messages are then provided to the search engine 32 and the NLP engine 33 for further analysis.
The messages are analyzed on the basis of keywords identified for a particular product. A basic text search is performed against all the messages posted by the search engine 32. The search engine 32 provides the categorization of messages. Detailed analysis of the message posts is done using the NLP engine 33. Natural language processing (NLP) is the field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language. Natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations such as parse trees or first order logic which are easier for computer systems to manipulate. The NLP engine 33 identifies a group of posts, sorts them on the basis of time and analyzes them to establish a context. A context thus established recognizes the background and other details of the problem. In this process all the messages related to a product are filtered out.


These filtered messages are then routed to a customer care module 50 where the messages are registered as a complaint or appreciation, which the customer care executive has to address. This routing is done through a CTI server 40 which ensures that the complaints are distributed evenly among the available personnel. The location information provided with each geo-tagged message is also used to route the grievance or appreciation to the nearest center. The packet receiver module 51 inside the customer care module 50 receives the packets of the filtered messages routed by the CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) server 40. Computer Telephony Integration, is the technology that integrates and co-ordinates the interactions on a telephone and a computer. The packets are then routed to the concerned personal interface module 52. Typically, the personal interface module 52 is operated by a customer care executive, who in turn contacts the customers to address their grievances.
Using the information related to the messages in the social network sites 20 which are tagged to their respective creators (customers) and from the profile maintained by the site for these customers, their contact details can be acquired. Also the profiles help the personnel interface module 52 to classify the customers into groups based on their age, locality and other parameters. This data will further help the company to deduce and establish a pattern of acceptance of the product. The personnel interface module 52 also displays the consolidated data on a screen. The customer care executive interacting with the personnel interface module 52 can then talk to the customer and update the details of the grievance or appreciation. The customer care executive can also update the system with the solution to the


problem and other additional details including customer reaction and satisfaction level for later reference.
In accordance with another aspect of the present invention, the interaction of the system 100 with other existing systems including agency subscription system, customization engine, billing system and CBR engine further simplifies and automates the system 100. 'Case based Reasoning' (CBR) is a concept by which problems are solved based on similar past events. Depending on how all the previous problems were addressed and solved, a knowledge base can be created. This knowledge base is referred for future complaints and actions are taken accordingly for a particular case. Only minimal manual intervention is required (that is, only to address any new problem to which the solution does not already exist in the knowledge base).
For every new customer, an initial round of data collection is done. This can be done remotely through a browser application or the customization engine. The customization engine will collect information regarding the company name and the common acronyms used, the product that needs to be analyzed and keywords and phrases which are of the highest importance. These keywords, along with a predefined set of keywords like 'good', 'hate' and 'bad' form the criteria to filter the messages. For each new customer the changes are minimal. Only a file which contains the keywords and the customer care number has to be customized for each customer.
Currently, in order to answer or attend to the complaints from the customers, employees have to be recruited at the customer care centers of all the companies. Each employee has to be paid around INR 15,000 per month. Even if 100 employees are recruited for the job, the company spends around


1.5 Million INR per month only in the form of salary. Also, the infrastructure overhead increases as facilities are to be provided to these employees. Apart from the facilities, the infrastructure required proves to be another overhead.
The proactive customer care system, when integrated with the CBR engine, can automate the entire customer care answering mechanism. Even if 5 servers are to be deployed for the realization of the proactive customer care system, the total cost will come only up to INR 1 million. This will also help to minimize the number of employees recruited by the company. Thus, the company's profit also can be increased easily.
TECHNICAL ADVANCEMENTS
The technical advancements of the present invention include realization of a proactive customer care system which:
• helps the companies to identify satisfied and unsatisfied customers;
• helps the companies to address grievances which are not reported to them by the customers directly;
• helps the companies to record appreciations to their products and services for future analysis;
• helps companies to know the opinion of a very large number of customers;
• helps companies to trace the customers very easily;
• is scalable; and
• can be realized at a very low cost.


While considerable emphasis has been placed herein on the particular features of this invention, it will be appreciated that various modifications can be made, and that many changes can be made in the preferred embodiments without departing from the principles of the invention. These and other modifications in the nature of the invention or the preferred embodiments will be apparent to those skilled in the art from the disclosure herein, whereby it is to be distinctly understood that the foregoing descriptive matter is to be interpreted merely as illustrative of the invention and not as a limitation.
Dated this, 107th day of August, 2009.

MOHAN DEWAN
Of R. K. DEWAN & CO. APPLICANTS' PATENT ATTORNEY