Semi-automated logging of contact center telephone calls

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. Copyright 2008 ACM.