Task-Centered Context Manager for Customer Relationship Management Systems

Abstract

In the customer relationship management (CRM) environment, agents tend to multitask. But the current CRM systems are not task-centered and therefore hinder the agent’s multitasking performance. We proposed the task-centered context manager, which better matches the agent’s mental model by focusing on the tasks that an agent is working on. The task-centered context manager automatically creates contexts, each for a separate task. It provides a flexible context switching mechanism for agents to easily go back and forth between tasks. And its priority-driven interface helps agents focus on important tasks. A formative usability evaluation indicated that our task-centered context manager was very well received by participating agents as evidenced by the overall System Usability Scale score of 88.5.