The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research
Tóm tắt
Call 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.
In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
Aguir M. S. 2004. Modeles stochastique pour l'aide a la decision dans les centres d'appels. PhD Thesis, Ecole Centrale Paris.
Aguir M. S., 2007, European Journal of Operational Research
Aksin O. Z., 2006, Management Science
Aksin O. Z., 2003, Designing flexibility: Characterizing the value of cross‐training practices
Aksin O. Z., 2005, On the interaction between resource flexibility and flexibility structures in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Analysis of Manufacturing Systems—Production Management
Aksin O. Z., 2006, Journal of Operations Management
Aldor‐Noiman S. 2006. Forecasting demand for a telephone call center: Analysis of desired versus attainable precision. M. Sc. Thesis, Technion, Haifa, Israel.
Anton J., 2004, Offshore company call centers: A concern to U.S. consumers
Armony M., Gurvich I. 2006. When promotions meet operations: Cross‐selling and its effect on call‐center performance. Submitted for publication.
Armony M., 2004, Design, staffing, and control of large service systems: The case of a single customer class and multiple server types
Armony M., 2007, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
Armony M., 2006, Operations Research
Atar R., 2004, Annals of Applied Probability, 51, 1084
Avramidis A. N., 2007, IIE Transactions
Baron O., 2006, Staffing to maximize profit for call centers with alternate service level agreements
Bassamboo A., 2007, Operations Research
Bhandari A., 2007, Management Science
Bhulai S., 2005, Dynamic routing policies for multi‐skill call centers
Bhulai S., 2007, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Byers R. E., 2004, The value of information‐based cross‐sales policies in telephone service centers
Canon C., 2005, Principles and practice of constraint programming
Carmon Z., 2002, The experienced utility of queueing: Experience profiles and retrospective evaluations of simulated queues
Cezik T., 2006, Management Science
Chevalier P., 2004, Routing and staffing in large call centers with specialized and fully flexible servers
Chevalier P., 2006, Optimizing the staffing and routing of small size hierarchical call‐centers
Easton F. F., 2002, Labor scheduling with employee turnover and absenteeism
Eichfeld A., 2006, The McKinsey Quarterly
Erlang A. K., 1948, The life and works of A. K. Erlang
Feigin P., 2006, Analysis of customer patience in a bank call center
Feldman Z., 2005, Management Science
Fukunaga A., Hamilton E., Fama J., Andre D., Matan O., Nour‐bakhsh I. 2002. Staff scheduling for inbound call centers and customer contact centers in Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Moncton, Alberta, Canada, July 28–August 1, 2002), Dechter R., Kearns M., Sutton R. (eds.), American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California, 822–829.
Gamarnik D., 2007, Steady‐state analysis of a multi‐server queue in the Halfin‐Whitt regime
Goodman J. A., 2003, Quality Progress, 36, 51
Guo P., 2006, The effects of information on a queue with balking and phase‐type service times
Guo P., 2007, Information and congestion in a service system with balking
Gurvich I., 2006, Operations Research
Gurvich I., 2006, Management Science
Gurvich I., 2007, Service‐level differentiation in many‐server service systems: A solution based on fixed‐queue‐ratio routing
Hasija S., 2007, Management Science
Helber S., 2005, Zeitschrift fur Betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung, 3
Holman D., 2005, The essential of the new workplace: A guide to the human impact of modern work practices
Hu B., 2006, On server partitioning in queueing systems during rush hour
Ingolfsson A., 2003, Combining integer programming and the randomization method to schedule employees
Johnston R., 1998, Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, 11, 69
Jouini O., 2006, Proceedings of INCOM, 2, 371
Jouini O., 2007, Queueing models for multiclass call centers with real‐time anticipated delays
Jouini O., 2007, Modeling call centers with delay information
Jouini O., 2006, Real‐time dynamic scheduling policies for multiclass call centers with impatient customers
Jouini O., 2006, Management Science
Kaspi H., 2007, Law of large numbers limits for many‐server queues
Keblis M., 2007, Real‐time staffing of virtual call centers
Koole G., 2003, Redefining the service level in call centers
Koole G., 2005, A note on profit maximization and monotonicity for inbound call centers
Koole G., Pot A. 2005b. Approximate dynamic programming in multi‐skill call centers in Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Winter Simulation, 576–583.
Koole G., 2006, An overview of routing and staffing algorithms in multi‐skill customer contact centers
Koole G., Pot A., Talim J. 2003. Routing heuristics for multi‐skill call centers in Proceedings of the 35th Conference on Winter Simulation, 1813–1816.
Koole G., 2000, Proceedings of QNETs, 23, 1
L'Ecuyer P. 2006. Modeling and optimization problems in contact centers in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Quantitative Evaluation of Systems (QEST 2006), University of California, Riversdale, IEEE Computing Society, 145–154.
Maister D. H., 1985, The service encounter: managing employee/customer interaction in service businesses
Mandelbaum A., Massey W. A., Reiman M. I., Rider B. 1999. Time varying multiserver queues with abandonments and retrials in Proceedings of the 16th International Teletraffic Conference, 355–364.
Mandelbaum A., 2007, Queues with many servers: The virtual waiting‐time process in the QED regime
Mandelbaum A., 2000, Empirical analysis of a call center
Mandelbaum A., 2006, Service‐engineering of call centers: Research, teaching, practice
Mandelbaum A., 2007, Staffing many‐server queues with impatient customers: Constraint satisfaction in call centers
Massey W. A., 2006, Queueing Systems
Mehrotra V., Fama J. 2003. Call center simulation modeling: Methods, challenges, and opportunities in Proceedings of the 35th conference on Winter Simulation, New Orleans LA, Chick S., S'anchez P. J., Ferrin D., Morrice D. J. (eds.), 1, 135–143.
Mehrotra V., 2006, New processes enhance cross‐functional collaboration and reduce call center costs
Mehrotra V., 2006, Intelligent procedures for intra‐day updating of call center agent schedules
Mehrotra V., 2007, Call center routing strategies in the presence of servers with heterogeneous performance attributes
Milner J. M., Olsen T. L. 2006. Service level agreements in call centers: Perils and prescriptions. Management Science, forthcoming.
Moynihan L., 2001, Knowledge sharing and performance of teams in call centers
Nakibly E. 2002. Predicting queueing delays for multiclass call centers. Ph.D. thesis, Technion Israel Institute of Technology.
Ormeci E. L., 2004, Revenue management through dynamic cross‐selling in call centers
Pichitlamken J., 2003, Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Winter Simulation, New Orleans, LA, 2, 1805
Pot A., 2007, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
Reed J. E. 2005. The G/GI/N queue in the Halfin‐Whitt regime. Working Paper.
Ren Z. J., 2006, Management Science
Ridley A. D., Fu M. C., Massey W. A. 2003. Customer relations management: call center operations: Fluid approximations for a priority call center with time‐varying arrivals in Proceedings of the 35th Conference on Winter Simulation, New Orleans, LA 2, 1817–1823.
Robbins T. R., Harrison T. P. 2007. A stochastic programming model for scheduling call centers with global service level agreements. Working Paper.
Ross A. M. 2001. Queueing systems with daily cycles and stochastic demand with uncertain parameters. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California.
Saltzman R., 2005, International Journal of Operations and Quantitative Management, 11, 1
Saltzman R. M., Mehrotra V. 2007. Managing trade‐offs in call center agent scheduling: Methodology and case study in Proceedings of the 2007 Summer Computer Simulation Conference, San Diego, CA. G. A. Wainer and Vakilzadian H. (eds.), 643–651.
Shen H., 2007, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management
Sisselman M. E., Whitt W. 2005. Empowering customer‐contact agents via preference based routing. Seatlink White Paper. Accessed at http:www.seatlink.netwhitepapers.asp.
Soyer R., 2007, Management Science
Steckley S. G., Henderson S. G., Mehrotra V. 2005. in Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Winter Simulation. Orlando FL. M. E. Kuhl, N. M. Steiger, F. B. Armstrong, J. A. Joines (eds.), 566–575.
Steckley S. G., 2007, Probability in the Engineering and Information Sciences
Sun B., 2006, Improving effectiveness of customer service in a cost‐efficient way with an empirical application to the call allocation decisions with out‐sourced centers
Taylor J. W., 2007, Management Science
Tekin E., 2004, Pooling strategies for call center agent cross‐training
Tezcan T., 2005, Mathematics of Operations Research
Tezcan T., 2006, Dynamic control of N‐Systems with many servers: Asymptotic optimality of a static priority policy in heavy traffic
Thompson G. M. 1999. Setting staffing levels in pure service environments when the true mean daily customer arrival rate is a normal random variate. Unpublished manuscript.
Torzhkov A., Armony M. 2007. Staffing of service systems with arrival rate forecast evolution. Working paper.
vonEmster G. R., 1998, Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 13, 375