Paper Info
Title
Call Center Outsourcing: Coordinating Staffing Level and Service Quality
Abstract
In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the call center's service quality by the percentage of calls resolved (revenue realized). The call center makes two strategic decisions: how many agents to have and how much effort to exert to achieve service quality. We are interested in the contracts the user company can use to induce the call center to both staff and exert effort at levels that are optimal for the outsourcing supply chain (i.e., chain coordination). Two commonly used contracts are analyzed first: piecemeal and pay-per-call-resolved contracts. We show that although they can coordinate the staffing level, the resulting service quality is below system optimum. Then, depending on the observability and contractibility of the call center's effort, we propose two contracts that can coordinate both staffing and effort. These contracts suggest that managers pay close attention to service quality and its contractibility in seeking call center outsourcing.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1287/mnsc.1070.0820
Management Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
exert effort,revenue potential,staffing level,coordinating staffing level,service quality,outsourcing supply chain,call center,resulting service quality,call center outsourcing,chain coordination,user company,supply chain
Revenue,Economics,Staffing level,Service quality,Staffing,Microeconomics,Queue,Outsourcing,Staff management,Supply chain,Industrial organization,Operations management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
54
2
0025-1909
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
42
2.13
21
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Z. Justin Ren113710.06
Yongpin Zhou223329.54