Visualizing Customer Journeys Through the Call Centre Landscape awarded
Visualizing Customer Journeys Through the Call Centre Landscape Robert S Laramee (Principle Academic Investigator), Rebecca Palmer (Principle Industry Investigator), Phil Smith–CEO, QPC Ltd., awarded by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), UK (Ref 41323-293384), 2014-2016, £494,576.00
For the past ten years, call centres have experienced phenomenal growth in virtually every country around the world. The UK has approximately one million people employed in over 6,000 call centres. Some estimates say 3% of all UK workers were working in a call centre (Holman, 2007). Some estimates put the number of call centers at around 140,000 in the US and Canada with perhaps 20,000 more scattered around the world. Other estimates say that presently, there are more than 1,00,000 call centres and seven million agent positions across the globe. The demand for agent positions is growing at the rate of approximately 23 to 25 percent. Driven by advances in information technology and declining costs of data transmission, firms have found it cost effective to provide service and sales to customers through remote technology mediated centres.
For the past 25 years, QPC Limited has been developing technology to enhance the call centre experience. Their software can track and archive the complete history of every call centre call, from the first time the call centre phone starts ringing to the time the customer hangs up. Every event associated with the call is recorded; the options chosen by navigating a selection menu, the time it takes to select an option; the list of agents that handle the call; each call transfer made; how the customer query is resolved, to post-call customer satisfaction surveys and much more.
Using this technology, QPC technology is an expert data collection and archiving tool for complete call centre history. From the data collection and storage point of view, the QPC technology is a huge success. Many terabytes, of customer-oriented, call centre data is archived and provides a very valuable resource for those studying improvements in the call centre experience. However, the QPC software, like all data gathering projects of this nature, faces major challenges from a knowledge extraction point of view. Our ability to collect and archive data vastly exceeds our ability to extract useful knowledge and insight from it. The QPC databases are vastly large, complex, containing hundreds of database tables, and stems from disparate, sources. The larger and more complex a dataset is, the more difficult it is to extract knowledge and insight. This is precisely where the power of data visualization comes in.
The exciting and vibrant field of Visualisation is an increasingly important research area due to its wide range of applications in many disciplines. Data visualization is vital in gaining an understanding large, complex data sets by exploiting the human visual system. Data visualization leverages modern computer graphics in order to provide a visual overview, explore, analyse, and present phenomena which is often difficult to understand.
This project develops novel, customized, state-of-the-art, interactive visualization techniques for call-centre data. We will develop visualization techniques guided by the visualization mantra, "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.." (Schneiderman, 1996)We will design visualizations that will empower the user by providing critical overviews of the call centre data as starting points for exploration.
We will also provide zooming and filtering techniques that enable users to interactively select the sub-sets of the data they currently find most interesting. This visualization project also develops novel, state-of-the-art visualization techniques for portraying customer-centred details on demand. We will draw on a wide knowledge-base of visualization expertise and current research literature to provide the most effective visualization solutions for the users including operations management, top level management, and call centre agents.
