To: N2630648@IBMMAIL IBMMAIL -N2630648 *qual-software
I am involved in a survey of practice in Customer Satisfaction
Measurement (CSM). We have carried out hundreds of interviews
with people at all levels in businesses, large and not-so-large,
with market research agencies and other consultancies offering
CSM, and with members of the public.
One of the new areas that we are exploring is the use for CSM of
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. These are well
established for routing in call centres, and for giving out
information. For CSM, the tedious process of selecting
successive options can be avoided. Customers can be given the
option to speak to a person rather than to the computer.
A big advantage of IVR is that it can record customers' verbatim
comments about the products or services they have used, with
minimal intrusion (compared say with outbound tele-calls) and
with little effort on the customer's part (compared with mail
surveys). These verbatim comments can be transcribed by audio-
typists.
Automated transcription is one key development, that will speed
up the process and make it less dependent on using people to do
routine tasks. The main difficulty, compared with present-day
transcription for use with dictation, is that the software must
cope with different accents etc., without an opportunity for
training. I would be interested to learn of any software
developments in this area, or of any commercial applications
that are already available or are known to be in prospect.
The bigger task, of course, is analysing the comments to produce
meaningful information. Although I have been an interested
observer of the Qual-software mailing list, I'm afraid that I
have not found time actually to get to grips with even one of the
programs, although I have some second-hand experience as a
commercial client. The question here relates to large-scale
applications, in which free-form text is routinely computer-
analysed without needing an analyst to examine and code it.
(Even if a great deal of analytical effort may have gone into
setting up the program in the first place.) Do such applications
exist? Can anyone offer references or nominate contacts through
which I could find out more?
I'll be grateful for any information, whether through the mailing
list - if readers think that it is likely to be of general
interest - or directly.
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