A Performance Measurement Framework For UK Contact Centres

Contact centres are used in a wide range of contexts by organisations and play a crucial role in shaping customer experience and managing customer relationship. Performance measurement is a crucial practice for contact centres that are committed to delivering superb customer service and keeping competitive advantages. Despite its importance, there are no studies that systematically review the performance measurement practice in the contact centre industry. This paper aims to develop a key performance indicator (KPI) framework for contact centres to evaluate and benchmark performance. A KPI framework consisting of six dimensions was developed from the literature and testedby means of a web based survey with Call Centre Focus magazine (CCF),ant authoritative and well-known call centre magazine in the UK. The survey was sent to 10070 contact centre professionals and had a response rate of 3.9%. The results were analysed with SPSS and factor analysis was used to validate the framework. The analysis showed the ten most important KPIs and exploratory factor analysis extracted ten factors. They confirmed the original framework to a large extent and also revealed new insights amongst the dimensions and variables. The framework has significant managerial implications and could be used as a guideline for contact centres for performance measurement. The framework could also be used to benchmark against other companies

A Critical Analysis of Creativity in Sustainable Production and Design

This paper provides a system level perspective of the contextual pressures facing designers, engineers and businesses today. In it, we challenge negative creative norms and we champion positive ‘post normal’ creativity to enable a sustainable future. We hypothesise that organisations working towards creative sustainable solutions are driven by a purpose designed to respond to the current and contextual pressures faced by the Earth’s systems, a global society and a global economy. Developing motivations within a sustainable system will require instilling a long-term world-view perspective in all learners— and in this we include international leaders and industrialists, business owners, academic teachers and pupils. A regenerative mind-set must be encouraged across the collective of engineers, designers and business leaders—so that humanity can realise ecological, social and financial prosperity. ‘Business as normal’ must come to an end. We must enable an industrialised humanity to design its way out of unsustainable times. Across undergraduate and postgraduate education, through to Continued Professional Development and lifelong learning, the impact of design and business decisions must be qualified and quantified with respect to the three pillars (people, planet and profit). The consequences must be recognised, discussed, measured and used to productive and healthy advantage. By generating and adopting a more holistic view of impact, we have the potential for making real time measurement in a clean Fourth Industrial Revolution. With tangible measures of impact across full project lifecycle and the full supply and distribution chain, designers and engineers will be better informed to make sustainable decisions

Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques

SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability

Towards a Business Model Framework to Increase Collaboration in the Freight Industry

Collaboration in the freight industry has not been widely adopted mainly due to the perceived barriers in competition resulting in a lack of trust among fleet operators. Collaboration in this sector has significant benefits, including the reduction of empty running, operating costs (OPEX) and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) resulting in greater utilisation of existing logistics assets. A review of the literature to establish the critical aspects of freight collaboration was undertaken, as well as analyses of published case studies and European Union (EU)-funded projects. The critical aspects and barriers identified include: revenue sharing; compliance with competition law; process synchronization; organisational and systems interoperability; different forms of collaboration from a physical and coordination structure perspective; and strategies for collaboration. To facilitate collaboration a freight collaborative business model (FCBM) framework that highlights problematic areas in freight collaboration is proposed to support standardizing collaborative practices in the freight industry. Three published freight industry collaboration business cases were evaluated against the model. The business model framework is intended as a tool to be used to compare different business models and identify the best innovations to help facilitate collaborative practices. The freight collaboration business model was applied to the Freight Share Lab research project in order to demonstrate the concept and investigate whether efficiency can be unlocked through deployment of a dynamic data and asset sharing platform to enable route and load optimization across multiple fleets of freight vehicles, rail freight wagons and containers

Object Oriented Extension to Time Series Model

It has been widely observed that temporal semantics and functionality are often developed on an ad hoc basis, and the benefits of temporal databases research are rarely realised. In this paper we propose an independent temporal model, which embraces object oriented concepts and also show how UML can be used to model temporal business concepts.