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“The Truth is Out There”: Using Advanced Speech Analytics to Learn Why Customers Call Help-line Desks and How Effectively They Are Being Served by the Call Center Agent

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Abstract

In this chapter, we describe our novel work in phonetic-based ­indexing and search, which is designed for extremely fast searching through vast amounts of media. This method makes it possible to search for words, phrases, jargon, slang, and other ­terminology that are not readily found in a speech-to-text ­dictionary. The most advanced phonetic-based speech analytics solutions, such as ours, are those that are robust to noisy channel conditions and dialectal variations; those that can extract information beyond words and phrases; and those that do not require the creation or maintenance of lexicons or language models. Such well-performing speech analytic programs offer unprecedented levels of accuracy, scale, ease of deployment, and an overall effectiveness in the mining of live and recorded calls. Given that speech ­analytics has become sine qua non to understanding how to achieve a high rate of ­customer satisfaction and cost containment, we demonstrate in this chapter how our data mining technology is used to produce sophisticated analyses and reports (including visualizations of call ­category trends and ­correlations or ­statistical metrics), while preserving the ability at any time to drill down to individual calls and listen to the ­specific evidence that ­supports the ­particular ­categorization or data point in question, all of which allows for a deep and ­fact-based understanding of contact center dynamics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission received 78,838 FDCPA complaints, representing more than $78 million in potential fines for improper collection activities (2009 FTC Annual Report on FDPCA Activity).

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Correspondence to Marsal Gavalda .

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Gavalda, M., Schlueter, J. (2010). “The Truth is Out There”: Using Advanced Speech Analytics to Learn Why Customers Call Help-line Desks and How Effectively They Are Being Served by the Call Center Agent. In: Neustein, A. (eds) Advances in Speech Recognition. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5951-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5951-5_10

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