Categorisation of customer and advisor in contact centres

This paper reports on the findings of a research project that had the objective to build a decision support system to categorise customer and service advisor (CSA) within customer contact centre (CCC) environment. We provide the methodology to develop a fuzzy expert system which assigns a new customer or advisor to the pre-defined categories. Categorising of customer and service advisor based on behavioural, demographic and experience variables, was one of the core objectives of the study. In the paper the process of building such a model which categorise customer and advisor through soft computing techniques is described. The behavioural aspects of customer and advisor are not an exhaustive list; but the authors own findings from the case studies at the contact centres. The reported findings and results are very promising, making the proposed model a useful tool in the decision making process, while some of the discussed problems and limitations are of interest to researchers who intend to use soft computing based approaches in other similar real life problems. The framework allows the managers within contact centres to understand the behavioural segments of customers and advisors (CSA) working at the centre and to provide information which would enable them to deliver better customer satisfaction.