Meet The Team
Black Box was created as part of a combined undergraduate and graduate service design senior studio.
The Black Box Project
A Consumer Research Consortium
The Black Box Project is a consumer research consortium dedicated to performing these tasks.
Publications
Digital Solutions
Black Box Analytics
Artificial Intelligence
The Black Box Project is a consumer research consortium dedicated to improving the increasingly callous customer service landscape. The Black Box Project's mission is twofold. The first objective is to further the understanding of human emotion within the service industry. To begin, our corporate partners and sponsors allow our representatives into their customer service programs to observe, gather data, and conduct experiments. These experiments help us learn how a company's customer base reacts to lexical, syntactical, and emotion-based stimuli and how those stimuli affect their customer's overall service experience. Once every year we publish the findings and suggestions for best practices in our free-to-the-public digital publication: Emotional Labor: Human Emotion within the Service Industry a Retrospective Guide to Superior Customer Service.
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Our second objective is to apply what is learned from the above research and offer a full-spectrum human-centered customer service solution that considers the needs of both the customer and the call taker for any industry.
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In addition to customer service and call center software solutions, The Black Box Project offers a modular space that allows call center professionals an opportunity to step away from their desk after a stressful call. In this space, the call taker will work with the Black Box's AI to dissect the call and learn how they could have provided a better service experience to the customer. As a result, the Black Box will help the company better understand their customer's problems from a more systemic prospective. The success of the Black Box can be attributed to the emotional data collected on both the call taker and the customer. In order to incentivize call center professionals to visit the Black Box and have one of their called dissected, call takers can use the large screen inside to stream their favorite content while eating their lunch.
Editor's Note:
Even though Black Box is part of a much larger system, this project will focus on The Black Box Project's second goal relating to the service surrounding the Black Box booth and the process used to arrive at this service concept. Mention of The Black Box Project is only intended to provide additional context to the class project.
Black Box
A Tool for Customer Service and Human Emotion Research
Black Box is a tool designed by The Black Box Project to track individual and organizational performance in a call center or service environment focusing on detecting and mitigating stress on employees. Black Box uses this data to improve the user's customer service skills, which will help reduce work-related stress. While Black Box is primarily a standalone system, companies can use the API to integrate Black Box's data into their ERP software as an added widget.
Using a subscription model Black Box provides companies with carious choices of subscription plans. A specialist will work with the company to find the most suitable plan to satisfy its workspace and special needed. A professional technician will install the booths.
The Black Box AI can use many different strategies to help the individual be more productive. To establish a baseline, the user's most recent stressful call is played back while the user continuously rates, every 400ms, their emotion and level of emotion regulation.
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Each Black Box booth is built to last. To protect the privacy of those using the box, every wall has sound insulation built in. Once inside the climate-controlled booth, the lights dim, and the user is greeted by an emotionally responsive AI shown on a flow to ceiling screen. As the AI moves across the screen, directional audio gives the user a more realistic experience.
Each booth is built on a modular platform and can be easily expanded to fit the requirements of each customer. The booths can be delivered preassembled or split into modules small enough to fit through doors. Each booth can be easily moved using the built-in wheels and leveling jacks or by a forklift. Assembly is easy, requires minimal tools and can be done in less than a day.
How Might an Employee Discover and Use Black Box?
Service Encounter Map
The Service Encounter Map:
An encounter map is a quick way to show the 'bigger picture' of a service through a series of paraphrased points arranged in a before, during, and after structure. The encounter map also provides additional context by focusing on how an individual's initial experience might look starting with the catalyst that triggers the individual to interact with said service.
How Might an Employee Discover and Use Black Box?
Service Offering Maps
The Service Offerings Map:
The service offering map visually describes the service as a whole. The individual components are split and sorted into three categories. The core is the primary service offered by The Black Box Project. Facilitating service components are services and goods which are critical to the core service's function and would cause the core service to collapse is removed. Enhancing components are services and goods that increase the value of the offering while setting it apart from the competition.
The Augmented Service Offerings Map:
The augmented service offering map illustrates components that describe how users will gain access to and interact with The Black Box Project. These components are categorized to help with understanding how The Black Box Project works and serves the customer. The augmented offering is split into three categories: accessibility, interaction, and participation. The components in these three categories describe how accessible the service will be, the tools required, and the overall quality of the interactions within the core service. Lastly, the augmented map describes how much the user is involved in the delivery of the service.
Creating Value for a Customer Need
Value Proposition Canvases
The Black Box Project's business model is based on the consortium making itself as visible as possible to other businesses, education centers, and the public. The business model enables the consortium to build a strong and sustainable reputation that is tightly woven into the scientific research community, the service industry, and the digital product industry. The consortium is designed to feed the Black Box Project's main directive, while gathering as much human emotion data as possible, to analyze and later lend to other studies conducted with assistance from The Black Box Project's corporate partners. The Black Box Project's goal is to increase our understanding of how human emotion operates within the customer service industry.
Value Segment 1: Customer - Focused Human Emotion Research within the Service Industry.
The primary purpose of The Black Box Project is to make itself as visible as possible to garner a strong reputation and to make it easier for the Consortium to find corporate partners who are willing to support their research efforts. The Black Box Project focuses on researching how emotion changes the purchasing habits of consumers in different industries. The Black Box Project applies research findings onto a series of products intended to reduce stress in the workplace, while also continuing to gather data to feed their research efforts.
The Value Proposition Canvas:
The value proposition canvas is a two-sided tool that helps an organization understand a customer's need. The canvas helps an organization create value that closely matches the consumer's need, transforming that consumer into a customer. The scope of a value proposition can focus on the company as a whole or drill down to each individual value segment in that organization's portfolio. Once fit has been achieved between the consumer's need and the value created by the organization's product or service, the value proposition can be plugged into the business model canvas. This helps the organization modify their product or service to better fit their customers' needs.
Value Segment 2: Full - Spectrum Customer Service Software Solutions (Strexxa)
One of the ways the Black Box Project accomplishes our key directive and draws customers into our system is by building Strexxa, a suite of full-spectrum human-centered customer service software solutions. These solutions are designed to consider the needs of both the customer and the call taker or service provider for any industry, all while furthering our research on human emotion within the service industry.
Value Segment 3: Black Boxes / Black Box AI
The Black Box Project uses their business software suite, Strexxa, to collect copious amounts of raw data from the software's users. The Project's AI can analyze the data before sorting it into a series of data lakes based on the type of data gathered and who will find it useful. From there, Black Box Project researchers work the Black Box AI to further analyze the data, look for patterns, or pad their research. Using a bot capable of speech content recognition (SCR) and speech emotion recognition (SER), the Black Box AI can analyze the voice and determine the speaker's emotional state. This information can then be blended with biometric data gathered from the subject, such as heart rate, blood pressure, and facial expression, in increase accuracy of the subject's emotional state determination.
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The Black Box AI can use this rich data to recognize when a participant in a call is becoming stressed. The call is then flagged in Strexxa so the Black Box AI can analyze the call-in greater detail. Once the AI is done analyzing the call, it will schedule the employee to visit a Black Box. During the visit, the AI will use a series of tests, questions, and small games to learn the employee's post-mortem thoughts on the call. Based on the employee's responses, the Black Box AI will then give the employee some suggestions on how to improve the customer's experience in future calls.
Exploring How a Business Functions
Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas:
A business model canvas is a tool used to describe, visualize, assess, and split a business model into smaller, more manageable building blocks to bring everyone onto the same page. The business model canvas is divided into nine blocks. These nine blocks are further organized into four principal areas of business: customers, offer, infrastructure, and financial viability. The whole canvas describes the logic behind how a company makes money.
How Might a Company Discover and Use Black Box?
Service Encounter Map
Exploring How Value is Exchanged
Value Flow Diagram
The Value Flow Diagram:
A value flow diagram illustrates how tangible and intangible value is exchanged between service, stakeholders, and consumers. For the purposes of this exercise, value is defined as being monetary, material, the assessed worth of an asset, and as having psychological or sociological significance. In addition to showing how value is exchanged, when used in conjunction with the value proposition canvas, the value flow diagram helps the user isolate individual transactions and find exchanges that do not produce any significant value for the service and should possibly be cut.
Next Steps: Prototyping Black Box Experiences
1
Continue researching emotional intelligence tutoring/research methods, workplace productivity, customer service tactics, and call center design.
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Begin prototyping the Black Box AI and user experience. Test frequently.
3
Build an updated version of the Black Box CAD model with more detail. Explore the modular construction concept more.
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Develop a click through version of the Black Box interface.
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Explore how the Black Box software can integrate into The Black Box Project's full suite of business software.
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Prototype the employee onboarding and training process.
The Road to Discovering Black Box
Continue reading to learn how we used the distributed memory model to morph five ordinary words into a narrative that led us to design The Black Box Project.
Instead of using traditional design research methods to find a space that we felt was unique, we chose to use a distributed memory model because it can generate movel results and is grounded in the scientific process.
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The process can begin with a number of common words, phrases, or short narratives. The first test is simple. We share these words or stories with out test subjects and, after a period of time, we ask them to repeat back what most resonated with them.
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The responses we get back are typically semantically or associatively related to our origional prompt.
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At times, our respondents may relate more to a specific word or phrase and supply responses that clearly follow a theme based understanding on that one work. We call this a 'memory basin.' These respondents can be very detrimental to our research because they contradict blind-variation-selective-retention (the responses we are looking for). If we recieve a lot of 'memory basin' responses, we will use the remining respondent data to modify our prompt for the next test.
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We continue running experiements like this until our results have settled upon a group of unique words or a phrase seemingly unrelated to our origional prompt that we can prove has clearly resonated with out respondents.
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To begin, each team member provided a word that is entangled with people's daily life. With these unique words in mind, we searched for an area where all five topics overlapped.
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Safety
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Commute
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Digital
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Non-Human
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Inclusive
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The project is centered on five ordinary words. These five words were used to explore human behavior and memory and synthesize our findings into an innovative service or product. We framed and reframed our topic, trying different prototyping methods to create a satisfying narative.
Escaping the Ordinary
Trails and Tribulations
After analyzing the data we gathered after testing our first five words for meaningful patterns, we found that most of the responses pointed towards transportation services. This result is rather unremarkable and still too close to our origional five words, so we decided to change our testing methods from social media to in-person interviews while keeping the same testing model. This first round of interviews yeilded comparable results to our first test, our respondents supplied answers like car rental, self-driving buses, and self-servicing cars.
How to Make Three Words into a Story
Workshop Design
To connect the three areas of interest back to the origional five words, we designed an abstract thinking workshop. The workshop also helped to designed the most compelling narrative and identified a concept nested on top of the narrative. Our workshop had a total of 18 participants split into six groups.
In the end, this group's responses stood out from the rest as being the most unique by popular vote.
We compared the responses from the remining groups to look for additional trends we could incorporate into our narrative.
Searching for Marketplace Need
Human Resource Interviews
We interviewed human resource professionals in the following industries:
Discussion Points:
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Disengagement in workspaces.
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The methods managers/HR use to deal with disengaged workers.
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Emotional labor in the workspace.
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The connection between emotional labor and productivity.
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The methods managers/HR use to deal with emotional workers.
Insights:
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Break up larger teams into smaller teams periodically to help them focus on problems and goals.
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Provide more individual time to work on projects.
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Open floor plans make it difficult to focus when multiple teams are working on various projects.
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Time is given to employees to de-stress during work days.
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Employees sometimes bring personal stress into the workplace.
Let's Dive Into the Numbers
An Introduction to Emotional Intelligence
Secondary Research
Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Secondary Research
How Does The Black Box Project Relate Back to the Five Words?
Digital
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Safety
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Inclusive
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Commute
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Non-Human
Black Box is a digital technology.
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Black Box protects our mental well-being.
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Black Box keeps our information private.
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Black Box can be used by everyone.
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Black Box uses artificial intelligence.
Next Steps: Prototyping Via A Distributed Memory Model
1
Design and host a new workshop to test the current Black Box Project business concept.
2
Analyse the memory results to see what the participants remembered. Adjust The Black Box Project's offerings accordingly. Repeat in a month with the same participants.