"in 2007 companies worldwide spent some $280 billion on outsourced call-centre services"
This is a huge market, and as anyone having seen call-centre software from the other end of a phone line can attest: It sucks.
I think that the current approach goes about solving the problem in the wrong way - the focus is on minimising the time per call which leads to an awful experience for the customer. Why not focus on accumulating knowledge instead? 99% of the questions have been answered before, and are basically repetitions. Find a way to dynamically learn answers to common problems that customers have based on previous calls and serve them to new callers. This isn't easy of course, but I think it can be done. And there's a $280 billion market waiting to buy...
This is a huge market, and as anyone having seen call-centre software from the other end of a phone line can attest: It sucks.
I think that the current approach goes about solving the problem in the wrong way - the focus is on minimising the time per call which leads to an awful experience for the customer. Why not focus on accumulating knowledge instead? 99% of the questions have been answered before, and are basically repetitions. Find a way to dynamically learn answers to common problems that customers have based on previous calls and serve them to new callers. This isn't easy of course, but I think it can be done. And there's a $280 billion market waiting to buy...