Call Center Science

As a lad I worked as a trashman for two consecutive summers for the township I lived in. It was decent summer work because the hours were defined by your work ethic and there was never work on weekends. It was there that I learned the consequence holidays can sometimes have on certain jobs. For example, the Fourth of July causes an irregular amount of trash such that us trashmen had to work overtime on July 5th to make sure our route was finished. Thus, nobody ever really looked forward to holidays.

In call centers like the one I work at a similar dynamic is felt. The financial markets are closed on weekends and holidays so we don't take calls on those days. Clients who wish they could have called on that holiday will call the next available day and so will those people who were already going to call that same day anyway. You get call overload as a result and phone associates are inundated with work. There's a lot that goes into combatting this and other familiar call center issues. Website functionality and automated calling systems certainly take a great deal of pressure off of the typical phone jockey, but common sense tells us that some customers will always feel more comfortable when speaking to an actual person. What's the best way to balance costs and call center efficiency? How do you handle an emergency such as a market recession without keeping callers on hold or sitting in qeues for hours? Should your center route calls based on the skill of its associates? What will all of this cost? It's a science, actually, and one that has been studied in depth. Though it may seem to you as it does to me that call volumes are impossible to forecast, millions of dollars are spent each year working on formulas to attempt this impossible feat.

I realize it might only fascinate someone who is stuck in a call center for 40 hours each week, but one of the more interesting fascets of call center studies is called Queueing Theory, which permits a calculation to calculate or forecast the average amount of time customers will wait on a telephone queue before hanging up. This is part of a statistic appropriately called "abandon rate." To date it seems the best, most up to date work on queueing theory as it relates to call centers has been done at the University of Pennsylvania. Maybe this explains why our techniques here at Company X in suburban PA are so efficient. I'm attaching links mainly for my own organization, but if you're in a call center, reading these documents can certainly help pass time off the phone and perhaps might even help you move your way up the ranks.

Statistical Analysis of a Telephone Call Center: A Queueing-Science Perspective

Anaylsis of Call Center Data