New Project Staffing for Outsourced Call Centers with Global Service Level Agreements

Abstract

e consider the issue of new project staffing in an outsourced call center required to meet a monthly Service Level Agreement (SLA). We present empirical analysis generated during a field study with a provider of outsourced call center services to illustrate the unique issues related to staffing a new project. Our work shows that during the start-up phase of a project agents experience significant improvements in productivity that reduce the staffing requirements over time. We also find that turnover, which is typically high in a call center environment, may be even higher for a project launch dominated by newly hired agents. These factors interact with the uncertainty of call volumes and talk time to create a difficult hiring challenge. We develop a model that finds the level of hiring with the lowest total expected cost of operation while meeting service level commitments.

Multiattempt Quizzes in an MBA‐Level Statistics Course

“…Much of the early work on Learning Curves was done in manufacturing, particularly in aircraft production (Argote, 1999; Argote & Epple, 1990; Argote, Beckman, & Epple, 1990; Asher, 1956). Learning curve models have also been applied in service industries including health care (Charland, Robbins, Rodriguez, Nifong, & Chitwood, 2011; Kaul, Shah, & Menon, 2006; Passerotti et al., 2009; Pisano, Bohmer, & Edmondson, 2001) and call centers (Kim, Krishnan, & Argote, 2012; Robbins, 2015; Robbins & Harrison, 2011). While there are papers related to teaching learning curve to students (Paxton, 2003; Robbins, 2019), we are not aware of any other work that specifically examines learning curve effects related to test taking.…”

Experience-Based Routing in Call Center Environments

“…Kim et al (2012) use data from a university computing call center to perform detailed econometric modeling of learning curve effects. Robbins and Harrison (2011) demonstrated a statistically significant learning curve effect in an IT help desk environment and evaluated the effect that the learning curve has during the launch of a new service when all agents are inexperienced.…”

“…At this higher level of granularity much of the stochastic variability of talk times is averaged out and the learning effect explains a greater portion of data variability. The learning curve effects in this analysis are summarized by Robbins and Harrison (2011) in the context of a new service launch problem.…”

“…Our observations are based in large part on empirical analysis of data from a call center outsourcing firm that effectively gives us a view of more than 20 IT help desk operations. These data were first analyzed by Robbins (2007) and later summarized by Robbins and Harrison (2011), and some of the graphs from those papers are reproduced here. For comparison we also consider empirical results reported in Gans et al (2010) Although many deviations from standard call center models are noted in these papers, the issues most relevant for this analysis are the following:…”

A Learning Curve‐Based Assembly Game

“…Kim, Krishnan, and Argote (2012) perform detailed econometric modeling of learning curve effects based on data from some universities' computing call centers. Robbins and Harrison (2011) analyze data from an IT support center and identify a learning curve effect in talk time for service calls. They then model the impact this learning effect has on staffing a new call center where all agents lack experience.…”