{"id":7857,"date":"2018-04-09T14:14:03","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T18:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/this-call-may-be-monitored-to-help-us-help-you\/"},"modified":"2018-04-09T14:14:03","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T18:14:03","slug":"this-call-may-be-monitored-to-help-us-help-you","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/this-call-may-be-monitored-to-help-us-help-you\/","title":{"rendered":"This Call May be Monitored to Help Us Help You"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone knows the utterly miserable experience of having to call a 1-800 number for customer support. You\u2019re frustrated, they\u2019re frustrated, everyone wants to leave the call with a resolution, but no one enjoys the experience. Boston based start-up Cogito is using data to try and help us all! With the growing importance of customer satisfaction in an age where consumers can take to social media to complain loudly about bad experiences, it\u2019s increasingly important to get it right the first time.<\/p>\n

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Cogito\u2019s solution is to marry behavioral science, real-time and historical data, call context, and industry and company norms to assess the call and recommend better actions for call center representatives and build customer empathy. The result is a company purported 20% improvement in customer satisfaction. On the call, Cogito tracks real-time metrics such as \u201cdialog speed, pauses, interruptions, volume changes and tone,\u201d and compares with call context, successful historical calls, and industry and company norms to provide actionable conversational recommendations and behavioral cues to call center representatives. Cogito has already attracted clients such as Humana and BlueCross BlueShield, Aetna. Results so far have been encouraging \u2013 with customers experiencing and average call time decline of 10% and fewer average number of call backs.<\/p>\n

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Call centers are an ideal lab for data collection and training the machine-learning powered algorithms. While the fully automated call center may be a ways into the future (who would want to try and have Siri solve all our problems?!), Cogito\u2019s program is helping the call center works become more efficient and empathetic on calls \u2013 by recognizing key words, trace emotions, and energy levels.<\/p>\n

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Cogito has the Pentagon to thank for their machine-learning software\u2019s ability to recognize distress and emotion in customer calls. The company\u2019s early genesis in the MIT Media Lab granted the company access to Pentagon-funded research that served as the perfect training data. The data, which came from a project to help veterans with PTSD, was audio files from interviews with patients with psychological problems, annotated to capture changes in emotional state. From there \u201cCogito applied deep-learning algorithms like those behind the improved speech recognition in assistants like Alexa to the Pentagon\u2019s data, and audio from call centers and other sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

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While Cogito is helping their clients\u2019 call centers become more effective today, the future of this technology is still to be seen. A couple of open questions for the future:<\/p>\n

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