Qualitative Strategy for Inbound Call Center Outsourcing

An analysis of the various challenges of the call center industry, together with the challenges of outsourcing, revealed a need for developing a strategy that acts as a guide for organizations that are willing to outsource their call center operations. This research therefore develops a strategy for this purpose. The research first provides mitigation strategies for the challenges of outsourcing and the challenges of the call center industry, followed by a strategy for the outsourcing of call center services. Telephone call centers are an integral part of today‘s business world, serving as a primary channel for customer contact for organizations in many industries. Globalization, the advancements in the telecommunication and technology industries, and the availability of cost effective work forces around the world are compelling organizations to outsource their functions (call center services) to reap the benefits that come with outsourcing. Organizations outsource functions, especially a function that is not their core competence, for a multitude of reasons. These reasons may include cost savings, quality enhancement/improvement, reduced time to market, tax benefits, and risk management. Outsourcing also comes with its share of issues. A few examples of the challenges involved in outsourcing include cultural differences, knowledge transfer to suppliers while protecting intellectual property (IP), knowledge retention, language barriers, ethics, norms of behavior, distance and time zones, infrastructure, privacy and security, skill set/quality, objectivity, geopolitical climate, labor backlash, communication, end-user resistance, and governance. There are also many challenges associated with the call center industry, such as, but not limited to, deploying the right number of staff members with the right skills to the right schedules in order to meet an uncertain and time-varying demand of service, forecasting traffic, acquiring capacity, deploying resources, and managing service delivery. Therefore, despite the advancements in telecommunications and information technology, the challenges faced by client organizations that outsource their inbound call center services abound. While choosing outsourcing/offshoring as their strategy, an organization can avoid many of the disadvantages that arise due these risks/issues by adapting a proactive and careful approach such as the strategy developed in this research

Modeling And Optimization Of Non-Profit Hospital Call Centers With Service Blending

This dissertation focuses on the operations problems in non-profit hospital call centers with inbound and outbound calls service blending. First, the routing policy for inbound and outbound calls is considered. The objective is to improve the system utilization under constraints of service quality and operators\u27 quantity. A collection of practical staffing assignment methods, separating and mixing staffing policy are evaluated. Erlang C queuing model is used to decide the minimum number of operators required by inbound calls. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments illustrate that through dynamically assigning the inbound and outbound calls to operators under optimal threshold policy, mixing staffing policy is efficient to balance the system utilization and service quality. Numerical experiments based on real-life data demonstrate how this method can be applied in practice. Second, we study the staffing shift planning problem based on the inbound and outbound calls routing policies. A mathematical programming model is developed, based on a hospital call center with one kind of inbound calls and multiple kinds of outbound calls. The objective is to minimize the staffing numbers, by deciding the shift setting and workload allocation. The inbound calls service level and staffing utilization are taken into consideration in the constraints. Numerical experiments based on actual operational data are included. Results show that the model is effective to optimize the shift planning and hence reduce the call centers\u27 cost. Third, we model the staffing shift planning problem for a hospital call center with two kinds of service lines. Each kind of service is delivered through both inbound calls and outbound calls. The inbound calls can be transferred between these two service lines. A mathematical programming model is developed. The objective is to minimize the staffing cost, by deciding the shift setting and workload allocation. The inbound calls service level and staffing utilization are taken into consideration in the constraints. Numerical experiments are carried out based on actual operational data. Results show that the model is effective to reduce the call centers\u27 labor cost

Minimizing average handling time in contact centers by introducing a new process: Rowan Support Desk case study

Quality of a call center performance is an important factor in insuring customer satisfaction. Customers, the callers , want their requests solved quickly, permanently and to their satisfaction. Often, there are staff constraints, budget or cost limitation, and the Service Level Agreement (SLA) which is resource availability to accomplish a task within a deadline. The purpose of this research is to analyze feasible approaches to minimize the long-lasting open requests and enhance a call center\u27s performance. Multiple challenges that a call center often faces in handling requests are studied to identify key bottlenecks in the process of handling requests. Rowan University support desk is used as a case study. The focus of this study is on over-extended unsolved requests under set of specific constraints. The following two alternative solutions were investigated and compared. One involves reorganizing the routing procedure, which would allow a ticket to be rerouted to the specialists. The other scenario investigates an increase in staff and efficiencies that would come with it. The research will show that with minimal effort in rerouting the unsolved tickets, we can decrease average handling time which simultaneously increases the total number of resolved tickets and minimize total processing time

A Call Center Simulation Study: Comparing the Reliability of Cross-Trained Agents to Specialized Agents

Call centers are an important function of most companies’ day to day business activities. They are often the link between a company and its customers and hugely impact the customer’s perspective or point of view (POV) of a company. A call center in the most general sense is a place, representing a business, which receives inbound calls from customers and/or makes outbound calls to customers, the latter being most commonly referred to as telemarketing. There was a time when a typical call center strictly consisted of agents who handled inbound/outbound calls; these agents are considered specialized agents. Generally speaking, a specialized agent is one trained, in-depth, in a particular area of knowledge. Most businesses have transgressed from your typical call center into contact centers. Contact centers operate essentially the same as a call center but interact with the customer in a variety of ways including, but not limited to: Phone, Mail, Fax, Email, and Internet (via online chat and instant messaging applications). The dynamics of these kinds of call centers has caused an increase in the need for agents to become more diverse in their talents and abilities to handle different types of calls. This has lead to specialized agents becoming general or “cross-trained” agents in which they are trained, broadly, over several areas of knowledge. The purpose of this thesis is to compare specialized agents to cross-trained agents and through the use of simulation, determine which of the two are more efficient and reliable in their ability to service the customer. This thesis has three major components: Simulation, Reliability Analysis, and Comparison. The results indicate that a cross-trained model is more reliable and efficient than a specialized model. Performance metrics common to call center literature, simulation, and Lean reliability systems were used to determine the effectiveness and reliability of the two models

Call centers with a postponed callback offer

We study a call center model with a postponed callback option. A customer at the head of the queue whose elapsed waiting time achieves a given threshold receives a voice message mentioning the option to be called back later. This callback option differs from the traditional ones found in the literature where the callback offer is given at customer’s arrival. We approximate this system by a two-dimensional Markov chain, with one dimension being a unit of a discretization of the waiting time. We next show that this approximation model converges to the exact one. This allows us to obtain explicitly the performance measures without abandonment and to compute them numerically otherwise. From the performance analysis, we derive a series of practical insights and recommendations for a clever use of the callback offer. In particular, we show that this time-based offer outperforms traditional ones when considering the waiting time of inbound calls

Using SIMCTS framework to model determinants of customer satisfaction: a case in an ISP

In this paper we describe a call center simulation case study that uses real data obtained from an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The case study is conducted using SIMCTS (Simulation Modelling and Analysis of Customer Satisfaction Patterns for Telecommunication Service Providers) framework [25]. The applicability of this framework to model ISP business scenario is discussed in detail. The simulation case study reveal that the dimensions of service quality have huge impact on customer satisfaction and also provide valuable insight in to gap analysis of customer perception and expectation. Various key satisfaction variables in relation to call center are modelled using SIMAN simulation language and ARENA simulation software. The simulation case study investigates service quality dimension, technical (or) functional service quality and their role in evaluation of overall satisfaction judgment. The simulation model collects transient performance measures which can be used to make competitive marketing decisions

Call Routing in Contact Center

Now a day companies uses the contact center to provide service to customer. One of the important challenges of today contact center solution is to align the customer to the most appropriate agent within the time constrain. Call routing is used to for the alignment of customer with agent. Call routing in the contact center also play an important role in customer relationship management. In this paper we discuss the various routing concept and we propose an advancement to the skill based routing concept called as advanced skill based routing