Call Center Information

Most corporations have call centers. A call center is a corporate function where the
corporation staffs phone operators to have conversations with customers. With a call
center, the consumer has a voice of the corporation with whom a conversation can be
made. In many ways, the call center becomes the direct interface the consumer has to the
corporation.

The conversations that occur in the call center are many and diverse:

• Some people want to complain.


• Some people want to buy something.


• Some people want product information.


• Some people just want to talk.

There is then a wealth of information that transpires in the conversations that
corporations with their customer or prospect base.

So, what does management of the corporation know about what takes place in their call
center? The answer is that management knows very little about what transpires in the call
center. At best, management knows how many calls occur daily and how long those calls
are. But other than that, management knows very little about what is being discussed in
their call center.

And why does management know so little about what takes place in the call center? The
answer is that management needs to look at conversations and conversation is
nonrepetitive data. And—prior to textual disambiguation—the computer cannot handle
nonrepetitive data for the purposes of analytic processing.

However, with textual disambiguation, organizations can now start to understand the
content of what is being discussed in call center conversations.

Fig. 10.3.1 shows the first step in doing analytics against telephone conversations.

Chapter 10.3: Analytics From Nonrepetitive Data