A Call Record Visualization Tool for Call Centers
Senior Project: 1997-1998
Seth Broomer, Joseph Fischer, Witaria Futanto and Jeffrey Orford
Lucent Technologies is adopting state-of-the-art data visualization
technologies to effectively monitor operations of large, complex, distributed
call centers. A call center consists of a telephone switching system to route
incoming calls from customers to one of any number of available agents, who
actually take the call and talk to the customer. Call centers are used for
handling airline reservations, catalog ordering, and technical help lines for
instance. The goal of this project was to use Bell Labs state-of-the-art
visualization technology to develop a system to display and analyze very large
numbers of call records.
A call center can handle an extremely large number of calls each day. There is
one call record for each call in the switch. The software allows a user to
visualize the call records to understand whether the call center is meeting its
objectives. Some examples of typical objectives are
How quickly are phone calls being answered? Do the high priority calls get high priority treatment? Do the agents spend too much (or too little) time with the callers? Do agents work on the right set of calls given their skills? Do callers spend too much time in "voice mail hell"?
The software allows a user to select data of interest and then bring up visual
representations of its components as bar graphs, histograms, and flow graphs.
The project was implemented in Java using an object-oriented approach and runs
under Windows 95.
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