RRBM Honor Roll

A vast body of literature has documented the negative consequences of stress on employee performance and well-being. These deleterious effects are particularly pronounced for service agents who need to constantly endure and manage customer emotions. A deep learning model was developed to identify emotion patterns in call center interactions based on 363 recorded service interactions, subdivided into 27,889 manually expert-labeled three-second audio snippets. In a second step, the deep learning model was deployed in a call center for a period of one month to be further trained by the data collected from 40 service agents in another 4,672 service interactions. The deep learning emotion classifier reached a balanced accuracy of 68% in predicting discrete emotions in service interactions. Integrating this model in a binary classification model, it was able to predict service agent stress with a balanced accuracy of 80%. Service managers can benefit from employing the deep learning model to continuously and unobtrusively monitor the stress level of their service agents with numerous practical applications, including real-time early warning systems for service agents, customized training and automatically linking stress to customer-related outcomes. The present study is the first to document an AI-based model that is able to identify emotions in natural (i.e. nonstaged) interactions. It is further a pioneer in developing a smart emotion-based stress measure.