The New Nation - Internet Edition

Md. Habib-ur-Rahman Mollah

A call centre is a physical place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organisation, usually with some amount of computer automation. Typically, a call center has the ability to handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen calls and forward them to someone qualified to handle them, and to log calls. Call centers are used by mail-order catalog organizations, telemarketing companies, computer product help desks, and any large organisation that uses the telephone to sell or service products and services.

A call centre can be seen from an operational point of view as a queueing network. The simplest call centre, consisting of a single type of customers and statistically-identical servers, can be viewed as a single-queue. Queueing theory is a branch of mathematics in which models of such queueing systems have been developed.

These models, in turn, are used to support work force planning and management, for example by helping answer the following common staffing-question: given a service-level, as determined by management, what is the least number of telephone agents that is required to achieve it. (Prevalent examples of service levels are: at least 80% of the callers are answered within 20 seconds; or, no more than 3% of the customer's hang-up due to impatience, before being served.)

Queueing models also provide qualitative insight, for example identifying the circumstances under which economies of scale prevail, namely that a single large call centre is more effective at answering calls than several (distributed) smaller ones; or that cross-selling is beneficial; or that a call centre should be quality-driven or efficiency-driven or, most likely, both Quality and Efficiency Driven (abbreviated to QED). Recently, queueing models have also been used for planning and operating skills-based-routing of calls within a call centre, which entails the analysis of systems with multi-type customers and multi-skilled agents.

Call centre operations have been supported by mathematical models beyond queueing, with operations research, which considers a wide range of optimization problems, being very relevant. For example, for forecasting of calls, for determining shift-structures, and even for analyzing customers' impatience while waiting to be served by an agent.

Administration of call centers

The centralization of call management aims to improve a company's operations and reduce costs, while providing a standardized, streamlined, uniform service for consumers. To accommodate large customer bases, large warehouses are often converted to office space to host all call centre operations under one roof.

Call centre staff can be monitored for quality control, level of proficiency, and customer service by computer technology that manages measures and monitors the performance and activities of the workers. Typical contact centre operations focus on the discipline areas of workforce management, queue management, quality monitoring, and reporting. Reporting in a call centre can be further broken down into real time reporting and historical reporting.

The types of information collected for a group of call centre agents can include: agents logged in, agents ready to take calls, agents available to take calls, agents in wrap up mode, average call duration, average call duration including wrap-up time, longest duration agent available, longest duration call in queue, number of calls in queue, number of calls offered, number of calls abandoned, average speed to answer, average speed to abandoned and service level, calculated by the percentage of calls answered in under a certain time period.

Many Call centers use workforce management software, which is software that uses historical information coupled with projected need to generate automated schedules to meet anticipated staffing level needs.

Varieties of call centers

Some variations of call centre models are listed below:

Remote Agents - An alternative to housing all agents in a central facility is to use remote agents. These agents work from home and use internet technologies to connect.

Temporary Agents - Temporary agents who are called upon if demand increases more rapidly than planned.

Incompetent or untrained operators incapable of processing customers' requests effectively.

Overseas location, with language and accent problems.

Automated queuing systems. This sometimes results in excessively long hold times

Complaints that departments of companies do not engage in communication with one another.

Deceit over location of call centre (such as allocating overseas workers false English names)

From Staff:

Close scrutiny by management (e.g. frequent random call monitoring).

Low compensation (pay and bonuses).

Restrictive working practices (some operators are required to follow a pre-written script).

High stress: a common problem associated with front-end jobs where employees deal directly with customers.

Repetitive job task.

Poor working conditions (e.g. poor facilities, poor maintenance and cleaning, cramped working conditions, management interference, lack of privacy and noisy).

Impaired vision and hearing problems

The net-net of these concerns is that call centers as a business process exhibit stratospheric levels of variability. The experience a customer gets and the results a company achieves on a given call are almost totally dependent on the quality of the agent answering that call. Call Centers are beginning to address this by using technology to standardize the process all agents use.

Call centre technology is subject to improvements and innovations, like most fields of free market commerce. Some of these technologies include speech recognition and speech synthesis software to allow computers to handle first level of customer support, text mining and natural language processing to allow better customer handling, agent training by automatic mining of best practices from past interactions, and many other technologies to improve agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

Automatic lead selection or lead steering is also intended to improve efficiencies, both for inbound and outbound campaigns, whereby inbound calls are intended to quickly land with the appropriate agent to handle the task, whilst minimizing wait times and long lists of irrelevant options for people calling in, as well as for outbound calls, where lead selection allows management to designate what type of leads go to which agent based on factors including skill, socio-economic factors and past performance and percentage likelihood of closing a sale per lead.