
98 3.5 Call centers—corporate business hubs
continuing problems that connect today’s call center to the past, as
noted at the beginning of this chapter.
As telephone services matured, several solutions to resource management
challenges were proposed. One of the first individuals to solve the problem
of handling vast numbers of incoming calls and arriving at the optimum
level of operator resources was A. K. Erlang. Erlang’s queuing formula,
Erlang C, still widely used today, gradually evolved into a programming lan-
guage (Erlang) that has been used in a variety of mission-critical areas, espe-
cially in applications that must run continuously and across ...