Assessment of Sales Negotiation Strategies with ISO 24617-2 Dialogue Act Annotations

Call centres endeavour to achieve the highest possible level of transparency with regard to the factors influencing sales success. Existing approaches to the quality assessment of customer-agent sales negotiations do not enable in-depths analysis of sales behaviour. This study addresses this gap and presents a conceptual and operational framework applying the ISO 24617-2 dialogue act annotation scheme, a multidimensional taxonomy of interoperable semantic concepts. We hypothesise that the ISO 24617-2 dialogue act annotation framework adequately supports sales negotiation assessment in the domain of call centre conversations. Authentic call centre conversations are annotated and a range of extensions/modifications are proposed making the annotation scheme better fit this new domain. We concluded that ISO 24617-2 serves as a powerful instrument for the analysis and assessment of sales negotiation and strategies applied by a call centre agent.