Call Center Measurements , Data Models and Data Analysis

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating socio-technical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments traditional operational models are of great value – and at the same time fundamentally limited – in their ability to characterize system performance. We review the state of research on telephone call centers. We begin with a tutorial on how call centers function and proceed to survey academic research devoted to the management of their operations. We then outline important problems that have not been addressed and identify promising directions for future research. 1 Data Generation and Reporting As it operates, a large call center generates vast amounts of data. Its IVR(s) and ACD are specialpurpose computers that use data to mediate the flow of calls. (Acronyms are explained in the Appendix at the end.) Each time one of these switches takes an action, it records the call’s identification number, the action taken, the elapsed time since the previous action, as well as other pieces of information. As a call winds its way through a call center, a large number of these records may be generated. From these records, a detailed history of each call that enters the system can, in theory, be reconstructed: when it arrived; who was the caller; what actions the caller took in the IVR and how long each action took; whether and how long the caller waited in queue; whether and for how long a CSR served the call; who was the CSR. If the call center uses CTI, then additional data from the company’s information systems may be included in the record: what the call was about; the types of actions taken by a CSR; related account information. In practice, call centers have not typically stored or analyzed records of individual calls, however. This may be due, in part, to the historically high cost of maintaining adequately large databases – a large call center generates many gigabytes of call-by-call data each month – but clearly these quantities of data are no longer prohibitively expensive to store. It is also likely due to the fact that the software used to manage call centers – itself developed at a time when data storage was expensive – often uses only simple models which require limited, summary statistics. Finally, we believe that it is due to lack of understanding of how and why more detailed analyses should be carried out.