Appliance Call Center: A Successful Mixed-Initiative Case Study

Due to the increasing importance of service offerings as a revenue source and increasing competition among service providers, it is important for companies to optimize both the customer experience as well as the associated cost of providing the service. This article describes a mixed-initiative system that was created to improve customer support for problems customers encountered with their appliances. The mixed-initiative system improved the correctness of the diagnostic process, the speed of the process, and user satisfaction. The tool has been in use since 1999 and has provided more than $50 million in financial benefits by increasing the percentage of questions that could be answered without sending a field service technician to the customers' homes. These systems are rather popular with companies because they save money--the companies' money, that is.