Telephone call centers: a tutorial and literature review (original) (raw)
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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.
Commissioned paper: Telephone call centers: Tutorial, review, and research prospects
Manufacturing & Service …, 2003
T elephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical 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.
The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research
Production and Operations …, 2007
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.
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.
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.
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.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION- STANDARDS The standards of telephone communication and behavior are directly associated with the customer’s reactions, customer satisfaction levels and perceptions of the Police Service generally. Additionally, the quality level of telephone interaction will directly or indirectly affect quantity. This depicts the direct connections of quantity concerns such as the rise of complaints, emotions, extended/wavering calls, number of missed/abandoned calls etc. with contact handler’s performance. Quality of telephone communication influence upon: • call handling results and staff performance • Client behavioral responses • Client perception and assurance • Staff assurance, self-esteem and inspiration • Pressure • Absence • Us vs. Them cultures • Understanding call handling management • Comparing other contact handling companies and client expectations • Understanding the standards used in Police Call Handling to evaluate an efficient client oriented performance Team of Emenac Call Center Services always stay ahead to put new techniques and communication antiquates to handle customers on all communication channels, this survey report is all about these features.