The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

Abstract

C all centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research.In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

Forecasting Call Center Arrivals: Fixed-Effects, Mixed-Effects, and Bivariate Models

“…One last feature of the call arrival process, which we also take into account here, is the time variability of arrival rates. Indeed, there is strong empirical evidence suggesting that arrival rates in call centers are usually not stationary; e.g., see Gans et al (2003), Brown et al (2005) and Aksin et al (2007).…”

The effect of social media interactions on customer relationship management

“…Social care can directly manage dissatisfied customers and offer solutions to the problems associated with the complaints (Bernoff and Schadler 2010). In this case, social care replaces costly offline customer service contacts (e.g., via telephone; Aksin et al 2007). Furthermore, social care promises to be much more efficient than previous bilateral customer service encounters.…”

Optimization of Multi-skill Call Centers Contracts and Work-shifts

“…The forecast of the demand can be refined to take into account the granularity of the time periods considered as well as end-of-the-day and peak-hours effects and other details (see for instance (Green et al 2007)). An introduction to the staffing problem with relevant bibliographic references can be found in (Aksin et al 2007). …”

“…Some approaches have been proposed to optimize call centers taking into account all the above mentioned features but they mainly work in two phases: first the optimal set of operators is defined and then the optimal schedule is computed for the given set of operators (Pot 2006, Pisacane et al 2006. In their comprehensive review paper (Aksin et al 2007) the authors point out that separately solving the shift scheduling and the shift rostering problems is a source of inefficiency and they cite some related contributions that mix simulation techniques, queuing theory techniques, mathematical programming techniques and heuristics. In this paper we give a further contribution along this research stream on multi-skill call centers by also considering the labor contract constraints and by proposing a very fast but still accurate solution technique for the resulting huge mathematical model.…”