Customer success professionals have busy schedules. With back-to-back meetings alone, it is difficult to find time and motivation to take accurate notes and review them all. At UpdateAI, our goal is to help customer-facing professionals capture ALL of their meeting notes and not let anything slip through the cracks. We strive to do this while also not creating more noise for our customers to sort through. In order to achieve this, we’ve introduced smart filtering to deliver only the most descriptive action items – so that it’s super-simple to immediately know what an action item is referring to.
Customer Success professionals have busy schedules. With back-to-back meetings alone, it is difficult to find time and motivation to take accurate notes and review them all. As UpdateAI, our goal is to help customer-facing professionals capture ALL of their meeting notes and not let anything slip through the cracks. We strive to do this while also not creating more noise for our customers to sort through. In order to achieve this, we came up with a way to deliver the most descriptive action items we possibly can. So that it’s super simple to immediately know what an action item is referring to.
First, what is an action item?
An action item is something that someone is required to complete at a later time (i.e. after the meeting). A good action item tells ‘who has to do what, and when they need to do it’, with ‘when’ being optional.
‘Who’ can be a person or a group of people (e.g. Joe or the engineering team)
‘What’ is a verb phrase for the task that needs to be completed.
‘When’ is a date or time frame that the task needs to be completed by. (e.g. by Friday, in the next two weeks)
For example, “Jessica will email us the report on Wednesday”. “Jessica” is the ‘who’ “will email us the report” is the ‘what’ and “on Wednesday” is the ‘when’.
But as humans we almost rarely comply with explicitly stating all of the elements of an action item (Who, What, and When). Instead, we use shortcuts, which leads me to descriptive action items.
What is a descriptive action item?
For our purposes, descriptive action items are defined as items that can be fully understood without additional context. Descriptive action items are important because they share necessary details the user should know, even if they don’t have the full context for the meeting. Without descriptive action items, users would almost always have to resort to scrolling back through their meeting transcripts to remember what was talked about.
The biggest hurdle with providing descriptive action items is something called anaphora. Anaphora, as defined by Wikipedia, is the “the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context”. The most common occurrence of anaphora is pronominal anaphora. An example of this would be: “That’s John’s team, but he didn’t play.” Instead of “that’s John’s team, but John didn’t play”. The pronoun “he” replaces “John.” Anaphoras are essential for humans to use. Our minds need shortcuts to process everything in our long days.
But anaphora makes it a real challenge for machines to recognize what the anaphoric reference is referring to. In a longer conversation with lots of pronoun usage, it is difficult to identify which pronouns are replacing which nouns.
In order to work with this limitation, we decided to take the utterances as they are, at face value, and use those to determine descriptiveness. First, we gathered action items from our most recent data. It was important that they were recent and from a real client. Then, we implemented a filter to remove non-descriptive action items based on some heuristics and our researched view on what a descriptive action item should look like. We determine, for instance, that a descriptive action item should contain at least two components out of the following list:
– a specific delegator (the person assigning a task)
– a specific assignee (the person who should do the task)
– a timeframe, or a specific action.
After that, we applied our “human in the loop” strategy. Individually, we went through the data and labeled instances we agreed and disagreed with the filter. After the results were reviewed by our data scientist, he came up with some patterns that he noticed, which were later refined by our linguistics team, to improve the filtering.
Here is a breakdown of how anaphora limits the clarity of action items, and how fewer anaphors can lead to more understandable items.
An example of a very non-descriptive action item would be “he will send it”.
It lacks the delegator, assignee, and a date. This essentially provides no information on its own. There are two instances of anaphora: “he” and “it”. With no prior context, we don’t know who “he” is or what “it” is.
A slightly more descriptive, but still non-descriptive action item would be “he will send the document”. There is one less anaphoric reference in this version (“it” is replaced by “the document”).
An even more descriptive item would be “He will send the financial document”. “The document”, which is a fairly commonly used noun in the customer success space, is now accompanied by an adjective that provides more context (“financial”).
A more descriptive item would be “He will send the financial document by Tuesday”. In addition to the elements described above, this now includes a date.
“Jose will send the financial document by Tuesday”. This adds the element of an assignee (“Jose”).
“Jose will send the financial document to the sales team by Tuesday”. This has an assignee, what specifically needs to be done, and a specific direct object for the transitive verb. It doesn’t have any anaphoric references. This version of the action item is ideal.
Because of the many permutations, one of our criteria for considering an action item to be descriptive is that it has at least 2 of the elements mentioned above. We find that these parameters provide enough context for the meeting participant/host to recall what was talked about.
This specific feature delivers the most important details for our customers to reference, but they can also dive deeper into context by reviewing utterances in their transcripts, should they choose. Providing these descriptive action items helps customer-facing professionals pick up whatever valuable pieces may be missing from their notes, without adding more information for them to sift through, furthering our mission to empower Customer Success teams to build great relationships with their customers and save time doing so.