Improving the Visualization of Call Trajectories, in Call Center Monitoring

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Abstract

This research evaluates the usability of an interactive tool that provides real-time data on the status of human-machine dialogues in a call center and displays the callers' paths through the dialog system. A usability study was conducted to evaluate the use of the actual interface and two new designs for the display of call trajectories. An empirical study with 18 subjects was conducted in which traditional tasks using three types of information displays were executed, while task time and accuracy were recorded. Significant reductions in task time and error rate were observed with the proposed designs.

Keywords

Call center monitoring, Call trajectories, Human-machine dialogues, Usability testing

1. Introduction

Call centers are "a set of resources - typically personnel, computers, and telecommunication equipment - which enable the delivery of services via the telephone" [2]. To keep their position in the market and satisfy the needs of the modern customers, the companies have been enforced to provide services by the telephone to their customers, making call centers an important part of their organizations. Traditional ways of monitoring dialog systems such as call monitoring and summary reports are either unrepresentative samples of the callers' population, subjective, or too coarse-grained to be of diagnosis value [1]. It is important for the organizations to gather real-time performance information to support timely decision making. The use of call trajectories for call center monitoring represent an advantage to traditional call monitoring and summary reports as the information is not limited to records of callers, enabling the visualization of the conditions of the call center. Call trajectory analysis may assist in the identification of crowded areas of the call center where customer accumulation occurs, incidences of repetition of instructions or customer tasks, most and least repeated paths, customer trends, behavior, and preferences.

The concept of call trajectory monitoring was applied by a telecommunication company in the development of a monitoring system that allows real-time system monitoring and provides graphical views of the callers' paths through the dialog system. Although the development of this tool represented an innovative approach for call center monitoring it introduced new challenges for the system analysts as it compromised the usability of the monitoring system.

The following problems related to the usability of the tool were observed:...