Call-Routing Schemes for Call-Center Outsourcing (original) (raw)
Related papers
2007
First call resolution, which in essence means the proportion of inquires that are successfully addressed after one call (note that the definitions of FCR differ, see below), has been getting more attention in call center management. A review of the literature, however, reveals that most of the interest has come from the practitioners (call center managers, consultants, etc.). We can only find a few research reports on FCR the benefits, the potential downsides, and more importantly, how FCR should be implemented in the routing of calls.
Call center outsourcing: Coordinating staffing level and service quality
2008
In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the call center's service quality by the percentage of calls resolved (revenue realized). The call center makes two strategic decisions: how many agents to have and how much effort to exert to achieve service quality. We are interested in the contracts the user company can use to induce the call center to both staff and exert effort at levels that are optimal for the outsourcing supply chain (i.e., chain coordination). Two commonly used contracts are analyzed first: piecemeal and payper-call-resolved contracts. We show that although they can coordinate the staffing level, the resulting service quality is below system optimum. Then, depending on the observability and contractibility of the call center's effort, we propose two contracts that can coordinate both staffing and effort. These contracts suggest that managers pay close attention to service quality and its contractibility in seeking call center outsourcing.
Improving Call Center Operations Using Performance-Based Routing Strategies
2007
The paper presents a simulation study of performance-based call routing strategies using a variety of routing rules based on historic data such as average handling time and first call resolution rate. We demonstrate the relative benefits of various performance-based call routing strategies using actual data from a financial call center. In particular, our modeling results indicate that call routing based on adjusted average handle time (AAHT) and z-scores of AAHT are two strategies that can substantially improve overall call center performance and customer satisfaction.
Staffing and Routing in a Two-Tier Call Center
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
This paper studies service systems with gatekeepers who diagnose a customer problem and then either refer the customer to an expert or attempt treatment. We determine the staffing levels and referral rates that minimise the sum of staffing, customer waiting, and mistreatment costs. We also compare the optimal gatekeeper system (a two-tier system) with a system staffed with only experts (a direct-access system). When waiting costs are high, a direct-access system is preferred unless the gatekeepers have a high skill level. We also show that an easily computed referral rate from a deterministic system closely approximates the optimal referral rate.
Optimizing the Staffing and Routing of Small-Size Hierarchical Call Centers
Production and Operations Management, 2008
M ultiple-skill call centers propagate rapidly with the development of telecommunications. An abundance of literature has already been published on call centers. Here, we want to focus on centers that would typically occur in business-to-business environments; these are call centers that handle many types of calls but where the arrival rate for each type is low. To find an optimal configuration, the integrality of the decision variables is a much more important issue than for larger call centers. The present paper proposes an approach that uses elements of combinatorial optimization to find optimal configurations. We develop an approximation method for the evaluation of the service performance. Next, we search for the minimum-cost configuration subject to service-level constraints using a branch-and-bound algorithm. What is at stake is to find the right balance between gains resulting from the economies of scale of pooling and the higher cost or cross-trained agents. The article shows that in most cases this method significantly decreases the staffing cost compared with configurations with only cross-trained or dedicated operators.
Routing and staffing in large call centers with specialized and fully flexible servers
2004
We use models of loss systems and a queueing simulation to optimize routing and staffing decisions in large call centers with any number of customer types and a mixture of dedicated and completely flexible servers. Given that flexible servers are no faster than specialists for a particular customer type, we show that in the loss system it is always optimal to send customers to specialists first. If all appropriate specialists are busy, we show that it is always optimal to send the customer to a flexible server, as long as the service time distribution on the flexible server is independent of the customer type. To specify the optimal mixture of dedicated and flexible staff, we find that a simple 80/20 rule works well for a remarkably wide range of parameters. In particular, for call centers that provide excellent service by setting a tight constraint on the customer loss rate or average waiting time, we find that 20% of the staffing budget should be spent on flexible servers while 80% should be spent on dedicated servers. We provide some intuition as to why a single proportional solution is so robust and discuss extensions to other types of systems.
2009
We evaluate from a VoIP provider's point of view possible strategies for selecting PSTN gateways and/or signaling servers (perhaps through ENUM) under blocking uncertainty. Different gateways may have different prices for terminating the VoIP calls to the PSTN and different blocking probabilities. A customer placing a call to the VoIP provider is impatient and may hang-up if the delay in setting up the call is large. Possible strategies for terminating the call to the PSTN include routing the call to the gateway which generates maximum expected revenue from the call, or simultaneously to a set of gateways charging different prices possibly, a strategy called 'forking'. Forking creates a race between the gateways who are trying to terminate the call and thus reduces the average call setup delay, but at the expense of increasing the average termination cost and the overall load of the system. For the above strategies we investigate the trade-off between the average profit generated by a call and call setup delay. We obtain under several assumptions the optimal set of gateways to which to send a call request. We also discuss the effects of forking on the overall call blocking probability of the system and the incentives for gateways and VoIP providers to deploy it. Our results suggest that if forking is enabled then it can be advantageous for gateways to introduce a small signaling charge.
A flexible architecture for call centers with skill-based routing
International Journal of Production Economics, 2015
We focus on architectures with limited flexibility for multi-skill call centers. The context is that of call centers with asymmetric parameters: unbalanced workload, different service requirements, a predominant customer type, unbalanced abandonments and high costs of cross-training. The most well-known architectures with limited flexibility such as chaining fail against such asymmetry. We propose a new architecture referred to as single pooling with only two skills per agent and we demonstrate its efficiency. Using simulation, we conduct a comprehensive comparison between this architecture and chaining. As a function of the various system parameters, we delimit the regions where either chaining or single pooling is the best. Single pooling leads to a better performance than chaining while being less costly under various situations of asymmetry: asymmetry in the number of arrivals, in the service durations, in the variability of service times, or in the service level requirements. It is also shown that these observations are more apparent for situations with a large number of skills, or for those with a large call center size.
Staffing and routing in a two-tier call centre
International Journal of Operational Research, 2005
This paper studies service systems with gatekeepers who diagnose a customer problem and then either refer the customer to an expert or attempt treatment. We determine the staffing levels and referral rates that minimise the sum of staffing, customer waiting, and mistreatment costs. We also compare the optimal gatekeeper system (a two-tier system) with a system staffed with only experts (a direct-access system). When waiting costs are high, a direct-access system is preferred unless the gatekeepers have a high skill level. We also show that an easily computed referral rate from a deterministic system closely approximates the optimal referral rate.
Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2012
I n many call centers, agents are trained to handle all arriving calls but exhibit very different performance for the same call type, where we define performance by both the average call handling time and the call resolution probability. In this paper, we explore strategies for determining which calls should be handled by which agents, where these assignments are dynamically determined based on the specific attributes of the agents and/or the current state of the system. We test several routing strategies using data obtained from a medium-sized financial service firm's customer service call centers and present empirical performance results. These results allow us to characterize overall performance in terms of customer waiting time and overall resolution rate, identifying an efficient frontier of routing rules for this contact center.