A method of service quality monitoring in contact centers with impatient customers

Abstract

Contact center is a development trend of call center. The aim that enterprises and governments organize their contact centers is to offer convenient and quick service forms such as telephone, email and fax communicating with their users. A service quality, which is too low, will decrease their credit and even cause losses. Thus, contact centers must offer high-quality service. But cost of service has to be considered, especially, cost of staffing. Hence, the service quality of the planned staff scheduling must be monitored such that it can run smoothly. But it is a challenge because the randomness of arrival of jobs and abandonment of impatient customers has to be considered. In this paper we present a strategy of service quality monitoring by introducing engineering process control (EPC), an effective tool of quality monitoring, to contact centers. The service quality is measured by service level (SL), taking the fraction of jobs completed whose time in queue is shorter than a given threshold, and probability to abandon (PA), the fraction that abandons while waiting, together. The method is implemented by fore-setting bounds for SL and PA. We adjust the service quality only if any of the forecasts for SL and PA is out of the bounds.

Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature review

“…Most current literature defines CCs as the physical station that allows an organization’s customers to contact them by different communication channels, such as telephone, touch-point telephone, fax, letter, e-mail, web, online live chat, and social networks. These communication channels have been studied in either a conceptual or an analytical way, for example: e-mail (Legros et al , 2013; Gupta et al , 2012; Li et al , 2012; Jolai et al , 2008; Malik et al , 2007; Nenkova and Bagga, 2003; Rodenstein, 2004), telephone (Murphy and Cerqua, 2012; Ali, 2011; Byrd et al , 2008; Millard and Hole, 2008; Balakrishnan and Munisamy, 2007; Koole, 2004; Armony and Maglaras, 2004; Lewis et al , 2002), instant message (Luo and Zhang, 2013; Sparks, 2012), live chat (Sparks, 2012; Mehrotra, 2003; Padmanabhan and Kummamuru, 2007; Steul, 2000), and social networks (Acharya et al , 2013; Burns and Friedman, 2012; Bordoloi et al , 2011; Schuster et al , 2011).…”