Performance assessment in an interactive call center workforce simulation (original) (raw)

Call center performance evaluation

2005

In this paper, the effect of using a combination of multiskill and specialized agents on the performance of a call center is studied. An OPNET simulator for the call center has been designed, implemented, and verified. The designed simulator has the flexibility that facilitates comparison of different scenarios. The scenarios are mainly oriented toward finding the performance enhancement that could be gained by using a combination of multi-skill and specialized agents. As the usual case in such problems, there must be an optimum combination that results in the best performance for a lower cost. The designed simulator provides a very powerful and scalable tool that could be used to find such an optimum, and could be easily modified to support larger call centers. Some selected scenarios have been tested and the results introduced and analyzed. The result of our research concludes that the economies of scale could be obtained by cross training only a minor fraction of agents.

Performance Indicators Analysis inside a Call Center Using a Simulation Program

International Journal of Business & Technology, 2016

This paper deals with and shows the results of different performance indicators analyses made utilizing the help of Simulation and concentrated on dimensioning problems of handling calls capacity in a call center. The goal is to measure the reactivity of the call center’s performance to potential changes of critical variables. The literature related to the employment of this kind of instrument in call centers is reviewed, and the method that this problem is treated momentarily is precisely described. The technique used to obtain this paper’s goal implicated a simulation model using Arena Contact Center software that worked as a key case at the time where the events analyses could be executed. This article comes to the conclusion that Simulation is a completely suitable instrument to accomplish its purpose since it could be adequate to demonstrate, for the call center taken into consideration principally that: (a) it is feasible to reduce the agent contingent; (b) reasonable variatio...

A simulation-based decision support system for workforce management in call centers

SIMULATION, 2013

Workforce management is critical in call centers, where thousands of calls are handled by hundreds of agents every day. In a call center, where the call arrival rates tend to fluctuate during the day, the agent allocation plans are required to be planned flexibly and the number of operating call center agents ought to be updated whenever needed, in order to keep the customer satisfaction level over a predefined level. Workforce plans are usually generated by the use of queuing models that are based on Erlang C calculations. However, they have assumptions that oversimplify the real system and jeopardize the validation of the model. At this point, the simulation models, which do not have such restrictive assumptions, are effective in calculating the required number of agents for each time period and measuring the performance of a given shift schedule. In this study, a simulation-based decision support system (DSS) is developed that runs on real-time data for one of the largest call centers in Turkey. The graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are designed in accordance with the man-machine interaction consideration to increase the usability, functionality and effectiveness of the DSS. It is shown that the combination of the advantages of simulation with a flexible and user-friendly DSS environment provides more effective and efficient workforce planning and performance reporting in call centers.

Performance indicators for call centers with impatient customers

IIE Transactions, 2013

An important feature of call center modeling is the presence of impatient customers. In this paper, we consider single-skill call centers including customer abandonments. We study a number of different service level definitions, including all those used in practice, and show how to explicitly compute their performance measures. Based on data from different call centers, new models are defined that extend the common Erlang A model. We show that the new models fit reality very well.

A Review of Call Center Measurements

The purpose of this paper is to examine the key performance indicators, (KPI's), that call centers or contact centers commonly use to measure performance. It is widely known that call centers typically measure everything and therefore are inundated with mountains of data that measure efficiency rather than performance. This study contrasts historical and current KPI's and what commentary and research indicates exactly what should be the focus of a high performance call center. The conclusions reached in this paper strongly suggest that call center performance is IT based meaning that the availability and quality of the infrastructure prohibits the call center representatives from performing at a high level. A review of other literature also finds that KPI's from a customer service representative point of view is far different than that of a call center manager or a higher level executive. This paper finds that there are far more metrics available to assess a call center performance than primarily efficiency type measures.

Modelling and simulation of a telephone call center

Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Machine Learning and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.03EX693), 2003

We consider a system with two types of traffic and two types of agents. Outbound calls are served only by blend agents, whereas inbound calls can be served by either inboundonly or blend agents. Our objective is to allocate a number of agents such that some service requirement is satisfied. We have taken two approaches in analyzing this staffing problem: We developed a simulation model of the call center, which allows us to do a what-if analysis, as well as continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) queueing models, which provide approximations of system performance measures. We describe the simulation model in this paper.

Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects

2003

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating socio-technical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments traditional operational models are of great value -and at the same time fundamentally limited -in their ability to characterize system performance.

Improving operational measures in a financial institute call center: a case study

Brazilian Journal of Operations & Production Management, 2017

This article presents a case study that shows the impact of a proposed method of performance measures in a call center service system in one of the largest financial institutions in Israel. It proposes a policy for load-reduction in the peak hours coupled with an improvement in the automated routing of customers’ calls. The case study shows the system's current state, and offers improvements to shorten the overall service time while increasing utilization of service personnel in order to decrease the abandon rate (AR) and increase service quality. The article starts by introducing the financial institute and its telephone service structure, the unique characteristic of the current service system, the different types of customers and their characteristics, the utilization of the system and emphasizes the phone call duration and AR. In addition, the article shows a simulation of the current state with an analysis of current service. It compares the current system with an alternati...

Modeling and Simulation of Call Centers

Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, 2005., 2005

In this review, we introduce key notions and describe the decision problems commonly encountered in call center management. Main themes are the central role of uncertainty throughout the decision hierarchy and the many operational complexities and relationships between decisions. We make connections to analytical models in the literature, emphasizing insights gained and model limitations. The high operational complexity and the prevalent uncertainty suggest that simulation modeling and simulation-based decision-making could have a central role in the management of call centers. We formulate some common decision problems and point to recently developed simulation-based solution techniques. We review recent work that supports modeling the primitive inputs to a call center and highlight call center modeling difficulties.

Call Center Scheduling Technology Evaluation Using Simulation

Proceedings of the 33nd conference on …, 2001

Telemarketers, direct marketing agencies, collection agencies and others whose primary means of customer contact is via the telephone invest considerable sums of money to make the calling operation efficient and produc-tive. Investments are required in human resources, infra- ...