Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 20
Conflict Cues in Call Center Interactions
Maria Koutsombogera, Dimitrios Galanis, Maria Teresa Riviello,
Nikos Tseres, Sotiris Karabetsos, Anna Esposito, and Harris Papageorgiou
20.1
Introduction
This work explores the multimodal nature of conflicts occurring in call center dyadic
interactions from a multidisciplinary perspective, including paralinguistic and
conversation analysis cues. It is based on a Greek phone company's corpus which
consists of conversations revealing how customers interact with call center operators
to express concerns in terms of efficiency, provided services, argumentation and
negotiation issues, and expressed emotions during the interactional exchanges. In
this setting, we consider conflictual the interaction between speakers that pursue
individual and at times incompatible goals (Allwood
2007
). Conflict holds between
the beliefs and goals of two individuals involved in the conversation, which, namely,
represent the consumer and service provider roles. Instantiations of emotional
behavior related to conflict and to the speakers' roles are, e.g., the expression
of frustration or anger on the customers' side, stress detection, disappointment
mitigation, and failure in providing the requested services or solutions on the
operators' side.
Understanding conflict cues and being able to model them enables the develop-
ment of technologies that can deal effectively and efficiently with the complexity of
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