HotSpots: Visualizing edits to a text

Compared to the telephone, email based customer care is increasingly becoming the preferred channel of communication for corporations and customers. Most email-based customer care management systems provide a method to include template texts in order to reduce the handling time for a customer's email. The text in a template is suitably modified into a response by a customer care agent. In this paper, we present two techniques to improve the effectiveness of a template by providing tools for the template authors. First, we present a tool to track and visualize the edits made by agents to a template which serves as a vital feedback to the template authors. Second, we present a novel method that automatically extracts potential templates from responses authored by agents. These methods are investigated in the context of an email customer care analysis tool that handles over a million emails a year.