Keith DIERKX

Biographical note
Keith Dierkx is IBM’s Global Industry Leader for Rail, Director of the Global Rail Innovation Center in Beijing, China, and a member of the IBM Industry Academy. He is currently working with major railways on the transformation of the railway industry including infrastructure rationalisation and transformation, the use of analytics and insight to deliver more effective and efficient services, and safety and security. Prior to joining IBM, Mr. Dierkx was a Senior Vice President of Operations for a major maritime terminal operator with responsibility for all IT Services. This included implementing major TSA and DHS grants to provide enhanced maritime safety and security.

Presentation: Enhancing Customer Service by Supporting Call Center Operators with AI Technology
East Japan Railway Company (JR East) is working on innovation in quality of service, based on customer feedback, to improve customer satisfaction. JR East and IBM developed an operator support system using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology in order to reduce response times and increase the response rate to customers from call centre operators. This system monitors the conversation between the operator and the customer, and presents related answers to the operator in real-time. In addition, the system can learn from the evaluations of operators to enable more accurate answers, through use of AI. Our future vision is to develop policies to support improved customer satisfaction by analysing big-data. In future, we will also develop an automatic reply system like a “Chat bot” to provide automated responses.