Transfer rate prediction at self-service customer support platforms in insurance contact centers

Rodrigo Andrade, Somayeh Moazeni

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Customer support constitutes the face of a brand and plays a critical role in shaping customers retention and loyalty. To facilitate customer contacts and to reduce the corresponding operating costs, organizations resort to self-service interaction channels. However, dealing with self-service customer support platforms has been identified to be one of the most frustrating aspects of a poor customer contact experience. This paper builds on real data from contact centers of a major U.S. insurance company, covering about 10 million calls, to study transfer rate at the interactive voice-response platform. We develop an empirical model to analyze features that exert significant impact on the likelihood that a call arrived to the platform is eventually transferred to a live agent. We find evidence that caller types, specific caller intents, trying distinct channels, and payment attempts can help predicting the transfer outcome. Our study confirms the importance of a caller's location attribute and evinces that the size and composition of the set of effective features and their directions vary substantially across different states. Our results provide managers with several actionable insights to enhance the customer contact experience. For example, our feature selection analysis enables designing personalized interactive voice-response systems based on customer-contact features. Identifying those calls expected to be transferred at any time can guide recruiting and scheduling a workforce with appropriate skill sets. In addition, the transfer rate is a key input variable for various decision making problems arising in the management of call center operations.

Original languageEnglish
Article number118701
JournalExpert Systems with Applications
Volume212
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2023

Keywords

  • Big data
  • Business analytics
  • Call transfer rate
  • Contact center
  • Feature selection
  • Machine learning
  • Self-service customer support platform

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