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Towards crowd-based customer service: a mixed-initiative tool for managing Q&A sites

Published: 26 April 2014 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    In this paper, we propose a mixed-initiative approach to integrate a Q&A site based on a crowd of volunteers with a standard operator-based help desk, ensuring quality of customer service. Q&A sites have emerged as an efficient way to address questions in various domains by leveraging crowd knowledge. However, they lack sufficient reliability to be the sole basis of customer service applications. We built a proof-of-concept mixed-initiative tool that helps a crowd-manager to decide if a question will get a satisfactory and timely answer by the crowd or if it should be redirected to a dedicated operator. A user experiment found that our tool reduced the participants' cognitive load and improved their performance, in terms of their precision and recall. In particular, those with higher performance benefited more than those with lower performance.

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    Cited By

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    • (2019)A Data-Driven Design Framework for Customer Service ChatbotDesign, User Experience, and Usability. Design Philosophy and Theory10.1007/978-3-030-23570-3_17(222-236)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2019
    • (2017)A New Chatbot for Customer Service on Social MediaProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025496(3506-3510)Online publication date: 2-May-2017
    • (2016)A Comprehensive Survey and Classification of Approaches for Community Question AnsweringACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/293468710:3(1-63)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2016
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          cover image ACM Conferences
          CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
          April 2014
          4206 pages
          ISBN:9781450324731
          DOI:10.1145/2556288
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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          Publication History

          Published: 26 April 2014

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          Author Tags

          1. crowdsourcing
          2. customer care
          3. mixed initiative
          4. q&a

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          CHI '14: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
          April 26 - May 1, 2014
          Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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          CHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 465 of 2,043 submissions, 23%;
          Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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          View all
          • (2019)A Data-Driven Design Framework for Customer Service ChatbotDesign, User Experience, and Usability. Design Philosophy and Theory10.1007/978-3-030-23570-3_17(222-236)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2019
          • (2017)A New Chatbot for Customer Service on Social MediaProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025496(3506-3510)Online publication date: 2-May-2017
          • (2016)A Comprehensive Survey and Classification of Approaches for Community Question AnsweringACM Transactions on the Web10.1145/293468710:3(1-63)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2016
          • (2016)User Methods and Approaches to Design Cognitive SystemsDesign, User Experience, and Usability: Design Thinking and Methods10.1007/978-3-319-40409-7_23(231-242)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2016
          • (2016)Design of CQA Systems for Flexible and Scalable Deployment and EvaluationWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-319-38791-8_30(439-447)Online publication date: 25-May-2016

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