Analysis of the Impact of Team-Based Organizations in Call Center Management

• Published in: Management science 2008-02, Vol.54 (2), p.400-414
• Main Authors: Jouini, Oualid, Dallery, Yves, Nait-Abdallah, Rabie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Approximation; Business management; Business services; Business studies; call center management; Call centers; Call centres; customer portfolio management; Dedicated systems; Demand management; Economic competition; Economies of scale; Engineering Sciences; Exact sciences and technology; human resource management; Human resources; Influence; Information and communication technologies; Management; Management science; Modeling; Network servers; Operational research and scientific management; Operational research. Management science; Operations research; Organizational behavior; Other; pooling; Portfolio theory; Quality of service; Quantum efficiency; queueing models; Queuing theory; Queuing theory. Traffic theory; Service industry; Service quality assurance; Staff; Studies; Tariff drawbacks; team-based organization; Teamwork; Work groups
• ISSN: 0025-1909; 1526-5501
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1070.0822

We investigate the benefits of migrating from a call center, where all agents are pooled and customers are treated indifferently by any agent, toward a call center where customers are grouped into clusters with dedicated teams of agents. Each cluster is referred to as a portfolio . Customers of the same portfolio are always served by an agent of the corresponding team. There is no specialization involved in this organization in the sense that all customer portfolios as well as all agent teams have (statistically) identical behaviors. The reason for moving to this organization is that dealing with teams of limited size allows a much better workforce management than the situation usually encountered in large call centers. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the benefits of moving to this new organization can outweigh the drawbacks. The drawbacks come from the fact that there is less of a pooling effect in the new organization than in the original one. The benefits come from the better human resource management that results in a higher efficiency of the agents, both in terms of speed and quality of the answers they provide to customers. Our analysis is supported by the use of some simple queueing models and provides some interesting insights. In particular, it appears that for some reasonable ranges of parameters, the new organization can outperform the original organization. We then extend the analysis to the case where, in addition to the identified customer portfolios, there is an additional flow of calls called out-portfolio flow . It is shown that this feature makes the new organization even more efficient.