Towards efficient contact center operation

An objective of contact centers is to provide high customer satisfaction at low operational cost. Customer satisfaction is achieved by providing high accessibility or short waiting time, as well as by providing a high quality interaction of agents with customers [58]. Operational cost is dominated (50-75%) by human resources [58,123]; thus reducing the number of agents is quite effective in reducing the operational cost. However, since fewer agents implies longer waiting time, which also causes a higher abandon rate, contact centers trade off high customer satisfaction and low operational cost. Thus, a major challenge in contact centers is determining the number of agents to be assigned (capacity planning) such that the right level of customer satisfaction is achieved at the right operational cost. Designing good routing policies at the automatic call distributor (ACD) is also important, since good routing policies can increase the accessibility or shorten the waiting time without increasing the number of agents.

In this section, we discuss how the results (analytical tools developed and lessons learned) in this thesis may be used in capacity planning and routing policy design at contact centers. In Section 8.3.1, we briefly review management of contact centers (see also Figure 8.2), including capacity planning and routing policy design. In Section 8.3.2, we discuss how the results in this thesis may be used in capacity planning. In Section 8.3.3, we discuss how the results in this thesis may be used in designing routing policies.