Mining of business-oriented conversations at a call center

Abstract

Recently it has become feasible to transcribe textual records from telephone conversations at call centers by using automatic speech recognition. In this research, we extended a text mining system for call summary records and constructed a conversation mining system for the business-oriented conversations at the call center. To acquire useful business insights from the conversational data through the text mining system, it is critical to identify appropriate textual segments and expressions as the viewpoints to focus on. In the analysis of call summary data using a text mining system, some experts defined the viewpoints for the analysis by looking at some sample records and by preparing the dictionaries based on frequent keywords in the sample dataset. However with conversations it is difficult to identify such viewpoints manually and in advance because the target data consists of complete transcripts that are often lengthy and redundant. In this research, we defined a model of the business-oriented conversations and proposed a mining method to identify segments that have impacts on the outcomes of the conversations and can then extract useful expressions in each of these identified segments. In the experiment, we processed the real datasets from a car rental service center and constructed a mining system. With this system, we show the effectiveness of the method based on the defined conversation model.