Call Center Management and its goals

A call center offers a service, delivered through telephone calls with clients. Service level
can be defined as the degree of satisfaction of callers with the offered service. This service
level consists of many different aspects, related to the quality of the answer, the waiting
time of the customer, etc. Some of these are hard to quantify, such as friendliness of the
agent, others are more easily quantified.
A help desk tries to answer 90% of all question correctly during the first call. Next to that
they require that 80% of the calls is answered within 20 seconds waiting, and that no more
than 3% of the calls abandons before getting a representative.
The manager of a call center tries to satisfy the service levels set by higher management,
given its budget, and other constraints such as the number of work places (often
called seats), the ICT infrastructure, and the available workforce. Of course, the higher
the budget, the higher the service level can be, due to better training and more available
resources. The main resource is the call center agent or representative, although communication
costs can also be high, certainly for toll-free services. This means that the
(infra)structure and processes of a call center should be such as to maximize the effective
and efficient employment of the workforce.
The cost-service level trade-off thus has a central place in quantitative call center management.
In general, when costs increase, then the service level (SL) increases. Thus we
can draw a graph in which we show the SL as a function of the costs. This is called the
efficiency curve. Every call center has its own efficiency curve. Where the effciency curve
lies depends on the infrastructure and the processes. They often depend on long-term decisions,
while the cost-SL game is played on a daily basis. For this reason we discuss next
the various types and levels of decisions that influence the performance of a call center.
After that discuss costs and SL in more detail.
In certain situations the profit of each individual call can be measured in terms of money. In
such a situation the average profit per handled call can be calculated, and instead of balancing
cost and service level, we just maximize profit