Conversations in Contact Centers

In outsourced call centres, large corporations outsource their customer touch-point to a hosting call centre. The in-coming and out-going calls may be monitored in real time, or recorded for a later review. The monitoring is done by human evaluators for small random call samples (much less than 1%). Their job is to track indicators of call quality and efficiency of the agents’ job. The call centre’s corporate client may require reporting in different aggregated forms according to , e.g., the topic of the calls or in other words, what their customers are asking about or the emotional content of the call – concerned, frustrated etc. In the quality function, there are professional evaluators filling out forms which include behavioural and conversational indicators, such as politeness, listening attitudes, empathy, language use, ability to keep the interaction focused, etc..  . In the outbound marketing campaigns, the data collected by ad-hoc human evaluators are used for assessing the performance of the call centre agents, for identifying job training needs, and to provide recommendations the overall quality improvements in the course of interactions with customers. The services provided by the human analysts and evaluators are very expensive in some cases or not feasible in others because of the data deluge.