The non-exclusive license covers services offered by Progress Energy in the ‘energy and utility services’ field of use, including customer service provided via automated systems and live agents. Other terms of the license were not disclosed.
The patents held by Ronald A Katz Technology Licensing cover a wide range of interactive technology, including automated forms of customer service, prescription refill services, securities trading, merchandising, prepaid services, telephone conferences, registration, home shopping, as well as functions involved in securing information from databases by telephone, interactive cable transactions, and various other uses of toll free and local numbers.
Mike Hughes, spokesperson for Progress Energy, said: It is extremely important to us that all Progress Energy customers are able reach us any time, night or day, to report an outage or receive information from us. We have added call centers and improved all of our call handling technologies in terms of both capacity and sophistication in order to ensure that this is the case. The technologies in this portfolio of patents are an important part of these call processing improvements.
