Taxonomies at the heart of a corporate brain for contact centers.

The business of contact centers makes up for an important percentage of GDP in many countries. Millions of people work in contact centers and they make literally billions of phone calls each year to do outsourced sales calls or set appointments or check on licenses. You would expect that in this day and age a contact center would be able to provide a perfect 360 overview of every contact person and company ever called and use that to improve the contact centers efficiency and improve sales for their clients. However that is unfortunately not the case. Contact centers suffer from the same disease that every other big enterprise suffers from: an abundance of silos that are resistant to integration. But in addition to that a contact center has two other major problems. One: they have to deal with a myriad of privacy laws, GDPR being the most important one, and two: contracts between clients and the contact center restrict sharing information about leads between various clients. We built a corporate brain, or 360 company knowledge graph if you will, that actually solves all of the above problems. The knowledge graph integrates all information from the regular silos but also takes the intelligent insights we extract from unstructured data, this includes the speech and nlp analysis of actual voice conversations and call notes. The knowledge graph makes it straightforward to deal with GDPR issues but also avoids breaching client contracts. At the heart of this knowledge graph are more than 40 taxonomies in 12+ languages. Some taxonomies can be generally applied to any sales call whereas other taxonomies are very client specific focusing on products, competitors and competitor products. The taxonomies are used for many different purposes: vocab generation to train speech recognizers,  entity and insight extraction from transcribed text, and data science over categories of insights and products. 

In the talk I'll go into more detail about how the corporate brain works but also how we manage the taxonomy process to tie all of it together.