SACA

Software Assisted Call Analysis

Hans L. Trinkaus, Andrea E. Gaisser

International Conference onCommunication in Healthcare 2009

October 4-7, 2009Miami Beach, Florida, USA

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SACA

Software Assisted Call Analysis

Hans L. Trinkaus, Andrea E. Gaisser

International Conference onCommunication in Healthcare 2009

October 4-7, 2009Miami Beach, Florida, USA

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Status quo / Task

30.000 counselling calls per year !

How to analyze, evaluate and improve them interactively ?!

Heidelberg (Castle)

Kaiserslautern (Institute)

Cancer Information Service (KID)

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Scope

A novel technique is introduced, based on a structure similar to a music score. Via a duet, between caller (patient) and counsellor (cancer information specialist), guided by the counsellor, the main contents of the dialogue are extracted and stored automatically. Trained speech recognition is used for the counsellor’s part for monitoring and controlling the call’s course.

knowCube®, an interactive multi criteria decision making tool, supports the analysis (retrieval, exploration, evaluation, comparison, clustering) of calls.

Keyword spotting is applied for the caller’s part to pick out instances from sets of expected values.

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Structured Dialogue Mappings

Today, after the patient/counsellor-calls nothing is kept back from such valuable dialogue contents. What can be done?

The Magic Flute Title Page of W. A. Mozart‘s Music Score

Look on that “object”, with huge information density and structure – inspiring to …

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Structured Dialogue Mappings

.. focus on a call‘s quintessence, i.e. meta data, like sex, age, size and weight, family status, education, level of language, … and information needs, concerning complaints, symptoms, diagnosis, therapy and course of illness,

.. get data values automatically, by applying speech recognition methods, using the pre-knowledge about expected parameter value sets,

.. map identified items onto a set of pre-structured tables, the framework for the dialogue course / work flow, serving as a basis for SACA,

.. for an interactive, guided assistance, prompting situational hints and addressing communication skills.

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The SACA Score

A Caller-Counsellor Duet, i.e. one of the dialogue’s phases.

Prototype of a C-C Duet Score

Tempo, loudness, mode, mood, ... are adopted, well-known musical marks, with outcomes gained by plug-in tools.

Background colours are pointing to different parameters, the words filled-in are the results of trained speech recognition or untrained keyword spotting.

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Guiding Communication Processes

Some topics: - A red dialogue thread always prompts to the counsellor! - What about caller‘s needs vs. counsellor’s advices? - Which information is optimal to use? - How to transfer communication into better emotion mode?

A Complete “Opera” (top) Dialogue-Quality/Rating (bottom)

SACA offers communication support, enables dialogue rating and quality improvement.

The complete (DKFZ-) dialogue follows a structured guideline.

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Extracting Contents

Extraction Component (Trained Speech Recognition)

The counsellor guides the caller through the dialogue.

SACA supervises both,

.. detects the current dialogue phase,

.. loads corresponding keyword lists,

.. listens to the caller’s part,

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Extracting Contents

Extraction Component (Trained Speech Recognition)

The counsellor guides the caller through the dialogue.

SACA supervises both,

.. detects the current dialogue phase,

.. loads corresponding keyword lists,

.. listens to the caller’s part,

.. and picks out matching values.

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Fancy Outlook: Navigating and Analyzing Call Clusters

The SACA scores’ data base inherits strong structure from knowledge extraction processes.

Exploration Component – handling graphically with all kinds of values, complex logical operations, user-defined similarities or metrics, …

knowCube®, an intuitive, multi criteria decision making software, is used for - navigating and analyzing arbitrary sets of calls, - by well-known graphical tools, like pen, brush and text marker.

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Summary

To our knowledge, no tool like SACA is available so far. The software assists in evaluating and monitoring the users’ needs and interactions.

Thank you for listening.

With appropriate “subject sensitive” customizing, SACA could support any medical call centre – and (mutatis mutandis) patient/physician communication, too.

Finally, the SACA system will interactively - provide online guidance, - assist the complete workflow/process, - contribute to quality assurance.