MD: ARAFAT HOSSAIN

DBA YEAR 2 SEM 1

BINARY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, MALAYSIA

Case Study: Continental Airlines-This Call Is Being Monitored

Q.1. what is the business benefit of the Call Miner system? Provide some additional
example beyond those discussed in the case?

To provide better service and market analysis successfully in an increasingly complex

and information-rich society, company must need to use technology. There are several
business benefit of this technology. Technology such as CallMiner has different kind of
benefit in different areas such as sales and marketing, customer service etc. The
CallMiner system allows Continental to understand the reasons why their customers
contact them, the value of those communications, and the effectiveness of its service
representatives in addressing the customers’ needs. In this globalization period, the spread
of technology and maximum use of advance technology–helps a company to reach their
desire target.
The business benefits of CallMiner system are:
- Improves customer service efficiency and higher customer satisfaction

- By mining the data CallMiner helps marketing plans to shape overall strategy.
- Competitive advantage-CallMiner’s ability to recognize root problems within the
reservation system and thus foster better and more effective customer service,
promoting Continental’s ability to be a leader within the airline industry.

- The CallMining software also provided Continental airlines the opportunity to

monitor agents’ responses to customers and thereby reveal areas in which agents
needed more training, and by better educating agents they became more effective
and efficient employees.

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 - It provides witness program and also reduce labour cost
- Helps to determine what customers really want and whether the right action were
taken

- Provides more time to analyze the data.

- It makes easier to mine database of voice record.
- Helps to build customer loyalty and ensures customer service.

Today the data collected by these dataminer’s is being used to train employees, to create
enhanced feedback of the customer response so as to make smart voice recolonization
menus, thus reducing the cost in the effect of reduced human interface and time.
Continental system are fixing the problems and providing a better overall experience for
its customers. It can be assured that many of these customers will continue to fly with
Continental.

Q.2. How can new technologies like CallMiner help companies improve their
customer service and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace? Explain.

Technology provides the tools for business to increase its productivity and profitability.
The new marketplace requires a new approach to gain a competitive edge in the
marketplace. New technology always comes with new facilities, tools etc. which provides
advance label formula to give some extra including old facilities. One of the major
factors to provide a company an edge is increased revenue’s. The deciding factor for the
same can be achieved by increased system automation and decreasing the amount of
employees required to handle the system. Also making the system customer friendly will
eventually result in increased customer loyalty and retention.
Each and every company wants to be the top most to their customer by providing their
customer better feedback, facility, availability of service, satisfaction – all the way. In the
other hand, customer also looks for the same thing – how they can get more benefit, less
price with much better feedback and care.

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Technology such as CallMiner can help a company to be Competitive in the following
ways:
 Accurately capturing concerns and needs of customers.
 By eliminating manual processes, technologies like this one improve the response
time.
 Least human interaction, by eliminating manual processes, technologies like this
one improve the response time.

 Identifying calls that can be pre-emptively solved or routed appropriately in order

to free agents to take reservations and make sales.

 By increasing efficiency of the business and obtaining customer loyalty through

increased customer satisfaction.

 By comparing the reason for the call with the representative’s actions, thus
determining the effectiveness of the response and need for further training.
 Identifying calls that can be preemptively solved or routed appropriately in order
to free agents to take reservations and make sales.
Now a day, it’s very challenging for the companies to understand and analyze the
customer needs. Therefore, more and more companies dependent on new technology to
strengthen their customer service. CallMiner gives more time to analyze the data to the
user. Almost all service oriented companies are now exploring the power of call
automation systems. Beyond basic revenues, this CallMining software’s enable
companies to find out common flaws and complaints about their services. So it can be
said that new technology is essential for companies to improve customer service and gain
competitive edge in the marketplace.

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Q.3.Andre Harris refers to calls reconfirms a flight as quite frankly, “low-value
calls’’. Why are they classified as low value? Why do you think so many customers
are placing such calls?

Computerized phone system that enables a person, typically a telephone caller, to make a
selection from a voice menu. Andre Harris most likely refers to flight reconfirmation calls
as “low value” because they are not only redundant, in that they are repeating processed
information, but also because they are paying employees to reconfirm flights when such
information could be provided through an automated system, a much more cost-effective
choice and they do not provide an avenue for interaction with the customer in any
significant way. This interaction allows the individual to communicate with the phone
system and thus the computer system. Nothing is being procured from the calls other than
using precious resources.

The reason such calls are being placed stems from mere customer un-education. Because
customers do not know such calls are not necessary, they continue to place
reconfirmation calls but alternately, verifying flight information by telephone also stems
from an older generation’s observance to voice-to-voice communication.

As technology is outpacing these older consumers, psychologically older customers feel

more comfort in speaking to human representatives. As phones are also becoming
necessitous, and wireless connections are not always available for laptops, telephone
verification calls also stem form the mere ease in placing the calls whenever or wherever.

Reconfirmations are probably a remnant of older practices in the airline industry. While it
is not usually necessary to reconfirm domestic flights, many airlines still require
passengers to do so for international ones. Sometimes customer needs a feedback to
ensure about the flight and information. As this practice varies across companies,
customers are on the safe side and call even those airlines that do not require them to do
so.

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Q.4 Many organizations are using some form of the call monitoring and data mining
to improve customer service and to gain a greater understanding of their customer
and their needs. Using the internet, do some investigating into who is using this
technology and it what form. In addition, see if you can find information suggesting
the real value of these technologies to the firms who use them.

Building customer loyalty has become crucial in the beleaguered airline industry.
Continental Witness Systems records conversations and captures every keystroke, so
managers know whether the right actions were taken. During investigation - found that
many organizations are using call monitoring and data mining technologies these days’
including-Insurance companies, hospitals, telecom and call centre’s, banks and etc. Some
organizations are an innovative provider of voice management system and dialog analysis
software. Few are like - VoIP gateway companies, some are terrestrial service provider
and some provides satellite services.
Telecom companies
The telecommunications industry generates and stores a tremendous amount of data.
These data include call detail data- calls that traverse the telecommunication networks,
network data,- the state of the hardware and software components in the network, and
customer data, which describes the telecommunication customers. Automated data
mining systems perform important functions such as identifying fraudulent phone calls
and identifying network faults.
Call monitoring in Call Centre’s:
Call monitoring, also known as quality monitoring, is crucial to a call center's success. It
gives the organization an idea of how well the center is meeting its customer service
objectives. Quality monitoring is one of the most effective methods for improving
customer satisfaction levels. Many supervisors and managers look for correlation
between customer service levels and quality monitoring scores.

Real value of technology: These technologies are not new in current world. With the help
of internet and fast growing mobile networks – to save time and for better security both
customer and organizations are very much dependent on these technologies. And for sure,
technology helps businesses to build satisfying customer relationships, resolve conflicts,

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increase sales, strengthen customer support and achieve higher productivity. In most of
the industry, the extent of the revenue advantage of the technology use is still to be
realized as the basic infrastructure development itself demands a lot of investment.

Q.5 Although companies who use call monitoring tell the listener that their “Call is
being monitored for quality assurance purposes” some customer feel this to be an
invasion of their privacy. Break into small groups with your classmates, and discuss
the various reasons why some customers feel their privacy is at stake with call
monitoring technologies. Discuss your thoughts regarding what you belive could be
done to mitigate privacy concerns with improving the value of the technology.

Call recording or call monitoring announcements to customers of the intent to record

their call for quality purposes is a prevalent practice in the call centre industry. The most
common recorded messages are:
• This call may be recorded or monitored for quality purposes
• This call may be may be monitored to ensure a high level of customer service is
provided
• This call may be monitored for training purposes
The primary reason for Call monitoring or data mining typically involves an observer
listening to a phone reps' calls, writing down his or her observations, evaluating the calls,
completing monitoring evaluation forms, preparing to provide feedback to phone reps, and
then following through with that feedback. B ut there are privacy and human rights concerns
associated with data mining, specifically regarding the source of the data analyzed. When
the data collected involves individual people, there are many questions concerning
privacy, legality, and ethics. In particular, data mining government or commercial data
sets for national security or law enforcement purposes. Various types of personal
information often come under privacy concerns. There are technologies like identifying
human emotions from their voice tones and pitch level- so many people may not be
comfortable to let a third party know about his/her personal feelings or emotions.
So I think employee should be able to carry out their work in a dignified manner, with
respect for their privacy and autonomy without fear of constant monitoring.

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Therefore, awareness is the key to successive use of technologies like the CallMiner,
consumers should be more conscious about privacy issues whether companies are
collecting or recording data without their consent.

References:
Ross A. Malaga, p.2005, “Information systems technology”, Pearson Education, Inc.,
upper saddle river, New Jersey.
James A. O'Brien, p.2004, “Management Information Systems”, 6th edition, McGraw-
Hill, New York
Bridget Finn, This Call Is Being Monitored Software that listens in on customer calls
helps Continental Airlines gather insight about its fliers, July 1, 2004, [online],
available:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2004/07/01/3748
33/index.htm
Sabio Net, Company Overview, 2004, [online], available:
http://www.sabionet.com/company.php
Global voice and data service: For business, Call monitor Limited, [online], available:
http://www.heathcomms.co.uk/whatwedo.html
Database Systems Corp, Call center systems and software resource center, 2008, [online],
available: http://www.call-center-tech.com/about.htm