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Semi-automated logging of contact center telephone calls

Published: 26 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Modern businesses use contact centers as a communication channel with users of their products and services. The largest factor in the expense of running a telephone contact center is the labor cost of its agents. IBM Research has built a new system, Contact-Center Agent Buddies (CAB), which is designed to help reduce the average handle time (AHT) for customer calls, thereby also reducing their cost. In this paper, we focus on the call logging subsystem, which helps agents reduce the time they spend documenting those calls. We built a Template CAB and a Call Logging CAB, using a pipeline consisting of audio capture of a telephone conversation, automatic speech recognition, text analysis, and log generation. We developed techniques for ASR text cleansing, including normalization of expressions and acronyms, domain terms, capitalization, and boundaries for sentences, paragraphs, and call segments. We found that simple heuristics suffice to generate high-quality logs from the normalized sentences. The pipeline yields a candidate call log which the agents can edit in less time than it takes them to generate call logs manually. Evaluation of the Call Logging CAB in an industrial contact center environment shows that it reduces the amount of time agents spend logging calls by at least 50% without compromising the quality of the resulting call documentation.

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  • (2021)Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation for Dialogue Sequence Labeling2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU)10.1109/ASRU51503.2021.9687959(433-440)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2021
  • (2019)Towards Identifying Impacted Users in Cellular ServicesProceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining10.1145/3292500.3330711(3029-3039)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2019
  • (2017)Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature reviewBusiness Process Management Journal10.1108/BPMJ-02-2015-001823:3(574-597)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
CIKM '08: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
October 2008
1562 pages
ISBN:9781595939913
DOI:10.1145/1458082
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 26 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. automatic summarization of dialogue
  2. contact center analytics
  3. natural language processing
  4. speech analytics

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CIKM08
CIKM08: Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
October 26 - 30, 2008
California, Napa Valley, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,861 of 8,427 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation for Dialogue Sequence Labeling2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU)10.1109/ASRU51503.2021.9687959(433-440)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2021
  • (2019)Towards Identifying Impacted Users in Cellular ServicesProceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining10.1145/3292500.3330711(3029-3039)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2019
  • (2017)Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature reviewBusiness Process Management Journal10.1108/BPMJ-02-2015-001823:3(574-597)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2017
  • (2015)The SENSEI ProjectRevised Selected Papers of the First International Workshop on Future and Emergent Trends in Language Technology - Volume 957710.1007/978-3-319-33500-1_2(10-33)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2015
  • (2010)Learning to model domain-specific utterance sequences for extractive summarization of contact center dialoguesProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters10.5555/1944566.1944612(400-408)Online publication date: 23-Aug-2010
  • (2010)Improving hmm-based extractive summarization for multi-domain contact center dialogues2010 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop10.1109/SLT.2010.5700823(61-66)Online publication date: Dec-2010
  • (2009)Towards real-time measurement of customer satisfaction using automatically generated call transcriptsProceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management10.1145/1645953.1646128(1387-1396)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2009

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