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Natural dialog in a time-sensitive setting: a study of telephone operators

Published: 03 May 1992 Publication History

Abstract

For economic reasons, the task performed by telephone operators is very time-sensitive, and the task has been studied extensively. Most of the work however has concerned the human-computer interaction between the operator and the workstation and not the human-human interaction between the operator and the customer. GOMS analyses of operators handling toll calls (1), found that conversation was on the "critical path" of the call most of the time. That is, during most of a call, verbally exchanged information was necessary for the next step. We are conducting exploratory analyses of operator-customer dialogs to learn how dialog variables might affect the speed or outcome of a call. In preliminary interviews with operators about their jobs, operators seldom mentioned the workstation, but rather talked about their job as dealing with customers in a time-sensitive way that balanced the demands of the job with the needs of the customer. The first study has focused on Directory Assistance calls, in which a customer asks for a telephone number (and/or possibly an address). The analysis focuses on what makes a long vs a short call and what makes a faster vs slower operator.

Reference

[1]
GOMS Meets the Phone Company: Analytic Modeling Applied to Real-World Problems (1990), Wayne D. Gray, Bonnie E. John, Rory Stuart, Deborah Lawrence, & Michael Atwood. Proceedings of Interact '90 - Third IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, D. Diaper et al. Eds., Elsevier Science Publishers, North Holland.

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  • (2022)Extending a Human-AI Collaboration Framework with Dynamism and SocialityProceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3533406.3533407(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
  • (2006) How (Fast) Can I Help You? Tone of Voice and Telephone Operator Efficiency in Interactions 1 Journal of Applied Social Psychology10.1111/j.1559-1816.1995.tb02389.x25:23(2086-2098)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2006
  • (1993)Project ernestineHuman-Computer Interaction10.1207/s15327051hci0803_38:3(237-309)Online publication date: 1-Sep-1993
  1. Natural dialog in a time-sensitive setting: a study of telephone operators

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '92: Posters and Short Talks of the 1992 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 1992
    138 pages
    ISBN:9781450378048
    DOI:10.1145/1125021
    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: 03 May 1992

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    • (2022)Extending a Human-AI Collaboration Framework with Dynamism and SocialityProceedings of the 1st Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work10.1145/3533406.3533407(1-12)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2022
    • (2006) How (Fast) Can I Help You? Tone of Voice and Telephone Operator Efficiency in Interactions 1 Journal of Applied Social Psychology10.1111/j.1559-1816.1995.tb02389.x25:23(2086-2098)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2006
    • (1993)Project ernestineHuman-Computer Interaction10.1207/s15327051hci0803_38:3(237-309)Online publication date: 1-Sep-1993

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