The contribution of information technology to call center productivity

Abstract

PurposeThis paper seeks to offer a strategic and socio technical analysis of the productivity of telephone call centers from the perspective of Galbraith's organizational design theory.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a quantitative survey of 155 call center managers in France, which benefited from extensive preparation through ten case studies.FindingsWhen focusing the analysis on call centers handling only inbound calls, five main factors: the profile of the telephone operators, division of labor, goals, reward system and the technology – including automated call distribution, computer telephony integration and e‐mail – are found to be important productivity enhancersResearch limitations/implicationsPerceptual measures when used are based on single items.Practical implicationsThe findings confirm the paramount impact of human resources' profile on the efficiency of call centers. As expected, automated call distribution is above all a productivity tool and should be recommended to all call centersSocial implicationsDivision of labor is important but, beyond a personal relationship with each customer, work in call centers has a collective component, which is best reflected by the efficiency of collective rewards.Originality/valueThe paper provides an evaluation method of call center productivity based on a first literature review on call centers from an IS perspective. It adapts Galbraith's organizational design theory and shows that for inbound call centers, which can be considered as a group of domains or set of tasks in Galbraith's organizational design theory, people, structure, goals assigned, rewards and IT all have an impact on productivity measured with the rate of efficiency.

The competitive impact of information technology: can commodity IT contribute to competitive performance?

“…The context of our study is IT-enabled CS initiatives, an area that has a long tradition in IS (see Ives & Learmonth, 1984;El Sawy & Bowles, 1997;Karimi et al, 2001;Theotokis et al, 2008;Rowe et al, 2011). The increasing importance of CS as a means to competitive differentiation and the co-evolution of CS and IT (Day et al, 2004) have renewed the impetus to advance this area (El Sawy & Bowles, 1997;Brohman et al, 2003;Ray et al, 2005;Chesbrough & Spohrer, 2006;Brohman et al, 2009).…”

Using activity-based costing and simulation to reduce cost at a police communications centre

“…Future actions such as the planned introduction of a non-emergency 101 call number aimed to reduce 'non-emergency' 999 calls will need to be assessed and incorporated into future data sets used by the model. In addition the performance of the call centre is dependent on a number of factors outside the scope of this study such as those indicated by Rowe et al (2011) as the profile of the call handlers, the division of labour, goals, reward systems and the use of technology to automate call distribution. For example Kekre et al (2011) explore strategies in a call centre for determining which calls should be handled by which agents.…”

From Organization Design to Meta Organization Design

“…The star model has also been used over the last ten years for studying its impact on call centers' productivity (Rowe, Marciniak and Clergeau, 2011) and the evolution of knowledge management during a merger (Ben Chouikha, Marciniak, 2013). We move away from the star model on two important points.…”