Electronic Companion OR Process Skills Transform an Out-of-control Call Center into a Strategic Asset

The estimation of financial savings from reducing telephone calls to an inbound call center appears at first glance to be a simple analytic problem: lower arrival rates enable the call center to staff fewer agents, thus reducing labor costs. However, the actual benefits-estimation problem is trickier. The company's customer base was growing each year; therefore, while our project was focused on decreasing the number of calls per customer, the overall arrival rate was continuing to grow, albeit at a lower rate because of the call-stopping program. The company was also selling multiple products, and releasing major new versions annually and minor upgrades throughout the year; in addition, there was significant seasonal variation in the call arrival patterns. The historical call-volume data was difficult to interpret because periods of significant understaffing had produced high levels of call abandonment and long waiting times, suggesting that historical call volumes were sometimes not an accurate reflection of actual customer demand. Finally, there was constant change to the mix of full-time, part-time, and outsourced agents, call-routing strategies, hours of operation, and agent deployments. We believe that creating an accurate, robust model for estimating the financial benefits of a call-stopping program is an open research question. Given the increasing focus on such programs (Price and Jaffe 2008), a full resolution of this research question should be beneficial to the call-center industry. We present three approaches below; undoubtedly there are others. We hope that future researchers will extend one or more of these models or devise entirely new approaches to address this highly relevant question.