Call Center Operation

61

3

Organizing and Managing the Call Center

You don’t know what you don’t know until you know it…the right

solution is a continuous search for the right solution.

Dr. Ichak Adizes

3.1 Overview

The turn of the 20th century was the dawn of a new age in communica-

tions. A few decades earlier, in 1876, the telephone had been invented and

telephone service was proliferating rapidly. As telephone services expanded,

the public began to depend on and even expect reliable service from tele-

communication providers.

As the subscriber base grew, telephone companies were contending with

new resource-planning problems. Automated central offices hadn’t yet been

invented, so human operators were required to establish connections for

callers. One big question was how many telephone operators were necessary

to run the switchboard. Too few and service levels would be unacceptable

to callers. But too many would be inefficient for telephone companies and

would drive up costs for subscribers. Further complicating the issue was the

fact that calls arrived randomly, driven by the myriad of motivations indi-

vidual callers had for placing calls. (see Figure 3.1)

In the years that followed, many bright people would grapple with these

resource-management challenges. One of the first was A. K. Erlang, an

engineer with the Copenhagen Telephone Company, who in 1917 devel-

oped the queuing formula Erlang C. The formula is still widely used today

in incoming call centers for calculating staffing requirements and is

described in greater detail later in this chapter. Others who followed Erlang

focused on developing disciplined forecasting techniques, scheduling meth-

odologies, and system report parameters; advances in the development of

forecasting and scheduling methodologies continue to be made.

62 3.1 Overview

The management challenge

Managing a call center operation successfully requires a multitude of

skills—managerial, troubleshooting, negotiating, and patience, not to men-

tion a personality that works well under pressure and is able to handle the

different types of CSRs who will work at the facility over time. Some famil-

iarity with computer and communications technologies is an asset as well,

although most internal call center facilities should have ready access to tech-

nical support for resolving hardware, software, and communications prob-

lems. The steady growth in the call center industry over the past 10 years

has resulted in a requirement for new job-related management skills. As call

center personnel have developed these skills, the position of call center

manager has evolved and is now a portable, definable position, recognized

from company to company and across different sectors of industry.

The global growth of call centers as a significant element of customer-

centered business has led to the employment of a large number of people in

call centers, estimated to be between 3 and 4 million, in North America

alone. From a labor market perspective, the industry is not saturated, since

the growth of call centers outpaces the supply of employees. Historically,

the industry has had a difficult time attracting a steady supply of qualified

workers. Turnover in the call center industry is a major problem as well.

Turnover rates are significantly higher than those of other industries. A

recent benchmarking study of call centers by the Purdue University Center

Figure 3.1 Typical call center infrastructure.

Voice

mail

Telephone

network

Terminal

devices

Predictive

dialer

VRU

Fax

server

E-Mail

server

S

w

i

t

c

h

Mainframe

computers

and databases

LAN