A Redesign Framework for Call Centers

An important shortcoming in the Business Process Redesign (BPR) literature is the lack of concrete guidance on how to improve an existing business process. Our earlier work has aimed at filling this gap by identifying a set of BPR best practices. This paper takes a further step by showing how a set of best practices can be used to derive a redesign framework for a specific domain, in this case for call centers. Such a framework identifies the various available design options and specifies the relevant performance characteristics. To evaluate concrete design configurations (i.e., coherent combinations of design choices) we use a formal modelling approach based on Petri nets and the simulation tool CPNTools. An industrial case study is used to gather relevant context data. We expect that this work helps researchers and practitioners to optimize the performance of actual call centers and to set up similar frameworks for other domains.