October 19, 2006
Call Centers Using 'Emotion Detection'
According to The Washington Post, over the past several years, technology designed for eavesdropping has found a new home in corporate call centers, recording and analyzing millions of phone conversations between customer service agents and consumers in an effort to better digest and organize what customers are saying.
Forrester Research estimates that annual sales of the emerging technology, known as "speech analytics" and "emotion detection," amounts to about $400 million and growing.
...Emotion detection, which tracks volume and pitch, grew out of voice verification technology, Fluss said.
The technology enabled FedEx, for example, to search calls from customers for the word "wow" to suss out really good, as well as really bad, customer experiences.
Every speech analytic and emotion detection system is slightly different, but the same basic features apply. They all record and transcribe conversations and categorize them by words and phrases.
... Companies want to dig deeper into calls in response to the "super-empowered angry customer," said Keith Dawson, editorial director of Call Center Magazine."
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