The Hindu Business Line : IBM unveils `desi' solutions for BPOs

How does one evaluate the language skills of hundreds of contact centre agents? How does one rate an individual's ability to understand the English that is spoken in a variety of international accents?

One of the more formidable challenges confronting the voice-based call centre industry has been addressed using Internet-based language technology. Researchers at the Delhi-based IBM India Research Lab (IRL) have created a Web-based interactive tool called "Sensei" (Japanese for `teacher') which checks and rates the grammar, pronunciation, diction and comprehension of voice-based call centre agents... by requiring them to respond to simulated situations - then automatically rating their performance and highlighting areas for improvement.

"This technology will hopefully help us develop the language skills that are absolutely necessary for a company or an individual to compete in the global market," feels lead researcher, Mr Ashish Verma. The tool currently works in English - the language that predominantly drives the India-based outsourced contact centre industry.

The technology was unveiled on Wednesday during a 2-day symposium organised by IBM, for the global media, on service delivery and outsourcing.

Content `discovery'

Another solution, flowing from the Bangalore-based IRL, helps squeeze extra information from the customer feedback to any enterprise, by quickly correlating the content of each item - e-mail or phone call - with the existing customer data and other business intelligence. It senses the customer's `mood' and his or her level of satisfaction - and by implication the readiness to receive other cross-selling pitches.

The twin technologies fuelling this application are: Symbiotic Content-Oriented Information Retrieval (SCORE) and Entity RecOgnition in the Context of Structured Data (EROCS).

HDFC Bank in tie-up

And the first beneficiary is HDFC Bank which has partnered with IBM in this project and says it is reaping huge business value by leveraging such tools in the service of over 10 million customers.

The two India-based IBM Research Labs are part of the company's 8 such establishments worldwide.

Mr Guruduth S. Banavar, Programme Director at the Bangalore Lab, told Business Line that many of the projects undertaken were in response to the technology needs of IBM's Global Services Delivery Centre in the city. However, the twin labs had also addressed tasks in national health data networking and education, in response to challenge posed to them by the President, Mr Abdul Kalam.