A Multimodal Approach to improve Performance Evaluation of Call Center Agent

The paper proposes three modeling techniques to improve the performance evaluation of the call center agent. The first technique is speech processing supported by an attention layer for the agent’s recorded calls. The speech comprises 65 features for the ultimate determination of the context of the call using the Open-Smile toolkit. The second technique uses the Max Weights Similarity (MWS) approach instead of the Softmax function in the attention layer to improve the classification accuracy. MWS function replaces the Softmax function for fine-tuning the output of the attention layer for processing text. It is formed by determining the similarity in the distance of input weights of the attention layer to the weights of the max vectors. The third technique combines the agent’s recorded call speech with the corresponding transcribed text for binary classification. The speech modeling and text modeling are based on combinations of the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Bi-directional Long-Short Term Memory (BiLSTMs). In this paper, the classification results for each model (text versus speech) are proposed and compared with the multimodal approach’s results. The multimodal classification provided an improvement of (0.22%) compared with acoustic model and (1.7%) compared with text model.

One Job, Many Lives

The lives of five workers, in three countries, can tell us much about the world of work today. Ashley, a young American, takes a job in a call center following a family tragedy, but quits it as soon as she is able. Mina, an Indian woman, must leave the industry because the men in her life believe that a “call center job equals a call girl job.” Daisy, from a rural province in the Philippines, desperately seeks call center work as a way to achieve independence. She aspires to be like her cousin Belle, a proud and sophisticated transgender call center agent. Joy, meanwhile, forgoes her dream to migrate and become a nurse in order to stay in the Philippines and make a decent living answering calls.

Responsible Women

Women in the Philippines, and eldest daughters (ates) in particular, are customarily expected to serve as breadwinners for their families, both immediate and extended. In a country where divorce is illegal and birth control is controversial, too many Filipinas find themselves with a larger network of people to support. Whereas in the past, these “responsible women” would have had to leave the country as migrant workers, call centers offer them a new opportunity to stay at home. Working as a call center agent, in other words, represents a sustainable solution to the dilemma of breadwinning. As a case study of Hannah, a breadwinner, illustrates, these jobs are lifelines.