Congrats to one of our alum, Keith Orndoff (’97) whose article “A Brilliant Technical Revolution”: Technical Service and Support in the Useful Future is in the May/June issue of SupportWorld, the Help Desk Institute’s industry journal.
In the article, Keith discusses how in the era of Big Data, tech and tech analytics will play huge roles in the near future of customer service and technical support. He covers electronic virtual assistants, predictive analytics and complex data mining, natural language processing and text analytics (sentiment analysis), and the awesomeness that is cognitive computing.
Having worked in a call center for a year, I found his implications for sentiment analysis in customer service particularly fascinating. Sentiment analysis is, “A linguistic analysis technique where a body of text is examined to characterize the tonality of the document.”
According to Keith:
“The potential of sentiment analysis is staggering. Imagine being able to apply an automated semantic analytics tool to a chat transcript or a call recording and immediately know how happy that customer was (on a scale of 1–10) by the end of that interaction, using text and tone analysis—no customer satisfaction survey needed here! After only a few exchanges with a customer, you could generate a personality profile that will tell you the best way to deal with that individual in the future. Such tools could also be used in the opposite direction: your technicians’ past interactions could be used to create profiles that would allow you to match an individual customer with the technician most likely to have the most positive interaction with that customer.”
I would have given my eye teeth as a customer service rep to have a profile telling me the best way to help a specific customer and the perfect technician to match him to. Not to mention the time and frustration such profiles could have saved everyone in the service department!
To check out the rest of Keith’s article, you have to register here (it’s free!) and the article is located here. Great job Keith, and I’m looking forward to reading your scenarios in the next issue!
