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Copyright of International Journal of Disciplines Economics & Administrative Scienves Studies is the property of International Journal of Disciplines in Economics & Administrative Sciences Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Problem definition: We study scheduling multi-class impatient customers in parallel server queueing systems. At the time of arrival, customers are identified as being one of many classes, and the class represents the service and patience time distributions as well as cost characteristics. From the system's perspective, customers of the same class at time of arrival get differentiated on their residual patience time as they wait in queue. We leverage this property and propose two novel and easy-to-implement multi-class scheduling policies. Academic/practical relevance: Scheduling multi-class impatient customers is an important and challenging topic, especially when customers' patience times are nonexponential. In these contexts, even for customers of the same class, processing them under the first-come, first-served (FCFS) policy is suboptimal. This is because, at time of arrival, the system only knows the overall patience distribution from which a customer's patience value is drawn, and as time elapses, the estimate of the customer's residual patience time can be further updated. For nonexponential patience distributions, such an update indeed reveals additional information, and using this information to implement within-class prioritization can lead to additional benefits relative to the FCFS policy. Methodology: We use fluid approximations to analyze the multi-class scheduling problem with ideas borrowed from convex optimization. These approximations are known to perform well for large systems, and we use simulations to validate our proposed policies for small systems. Results: We propose a multi-class time-in-queue policy that prioritizes both across customer classes and within each class using a simple rule and further show that most of the gains of such a policy can be achieved by deviating from within-class FCFS for at most one customer class. In addition, for systems with exponential patience times, our policy reduces to a simple priority-based policy, which we prove is asymptotically optimal for Markovian systems with an optimality gap that does not grow with system scale. Managerial implications: Our work provides managers ways of improving quality of service to manage parallel server queueing systems. We propose easy-to-implement policies that perform well relative to reasonable benchmarks. Our work also adds to the academic literature on multi-class queueing systems by demonstrating the joint benefits of cross- and within-class prioritization. Funding: A. Bassamboo received financial support from the National Science Foundation [Grant CMMI 2006350]. C. (A.) Wu received financial support from the Hong Kong General Research Fund [Early Career Scheme, Project 26206419]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1190. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization models enable organizations to find the best solution and respond to the demand from an uncertain environment and stochastic process promptly and with less engineering effort. This study aims to optimize the number of seasonal agents and customer prioritization needed for a call center system using big data analytics and discrete event simulations to improve customer satisfaction. The study was carried out based on data from a leading heating and ventilation company's call center. The K-means clustering technique was used to determine customer segmentation on 6-million-customer data. For prioritization, the making of a Recency-Frequency-Monetary (RFM) analysis was applied. The system was modeled using ARENA simulation software, and performance parameters were measured depending on the segments obtained. The results show that the simulation model performed with data analytics gives better results for a beneficial financial impact with numerical values in customer prioritization, reducing the average waiting time of the most prioritized customers by more than 90%, and for the least prioritized customers, it increased the average waiting time by approximately just 40%. However, with the company segments, the increase in the average waiting time of the least prioritized customers was approximately 300%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As service centers become crucial corporate assets for increasing customer relationships and profits, it is imperative to understand customer reactions to service allocations. Using customer call history from a DSL service, the authors empirically investigate how customers' onshore and offshore experiences affect service duration and customer retention. They formulate service channel allocation decisions as solutions to a dynamic programming problem in which the firm learns about heterogeneous customer preferences, balances short-term service costs with long-term customer retention, and optimally matches customers with their preferred centers to maximize long-term profit. They demonstrate through simulations that learning enables a firm to make more customized allocations and that acting on long-term customer responses prompts the firm to make proactive decisions that prevent customers from leaving. As a result, the firm can improve customer retention and profit. The proposed framework also mirrors the recent trend of companies seeking solutions that transform customer information into customized and dynamic marketing decisions to improve long-term profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Telephone call centers offer a convenient communication channel between businesses and their customers. Efficient management of call centers needs accurate modeling of customer waiting behavior, which contains important information about customer patience (how long a customer is willing to wait) and service quality (how long a customer needs to wait to get served). Hazard functions offer dynamic characterization of customer waiting behavior, and provide critical inputs for agent scheduling. Motivated by this application, we develop a two-way functional hazards (tF-Hazards) model to study customer waiting behavior as a function of two timescales, waiting duration and the time of day that a customer calls in. The model stems from a two-way piecewise constant hazard function, and imposes low-rank structure and smoothness on the hazard rates to enhance interpretability. We exploit an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm to optimize a penalized likelihood function of the model. We carefully analyze the data from a U.S. Bank call center, and provide informative insights about customer patience and service quality patterns along waiting time and across different times of a day. The findings provide primitive inputs for call center agent staffing and scheduling, as well as for call center practitioners to understand the effect of system protocols on customer waiting behavior. Supplementary materials for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports in the special issue on topics including politeness in call-centre practitioners, customer experience, and rapport management.

Abstract: Miscommunication phenomena such as repair in dialogue are important indicators of the quality of communication. Automatic detection is therefore a key step toward tools that can characterize communication quality and thus help in applications from call center management to mental health monitoring. However, most existing computational linguistic approaches to these phenomena are unsuitable for general use in this way, and particularly for analyzing human–human dialogue: Although models of other‐repair are common in human‐computer dialogue systems, they tend to focus on specific phenomena (e.g., repair initiation by systems), missing the range of repair and repair initiation forms used by humans; and while self‐repair models for speech recognition and understanding are advanced, they tend to focus on removal of “disfluent” material important for full understanding of the discourse contribution, and/or rely on domain‐specific knowledge. We explain the requirements for more satisfactory models, including incrementality of processing and robustness to sparsity. We then describe models for self‐ and other‐repair detection that meet these requirements (for the former, an adaptation of an existing repair model; for the latter, an adaptation of standard techniques) and investigate how they perform on datasets from a range of dialogue genres and domains, with promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In personalized queues, information at the level of individuals-customers or servers-affects system dynamics. Such information is becoming increasingly accessible, directly or statistically, as exemplified by personalized/precision medicine (customers) or call center workforce management (servers). In the present work, we take advantage of personalized information about customers, specifically knowledge of their actual (im)patience while waiting to be served. This waiting takes place in a many-server queue that alternates between over- and underloaded periods, hence a fluid view provides a natural modeling framework. The parsimonious fluid view enables us to parameterize and analyze partial information, and consequently calculate and understand the benefits from personalized customer information. We do this by comparing least-patience first (LPF) routing (personalized) against FCFS (relatively info-ignorant). An example of a resulting insight is that LPF can provide significant advantages over FCFS when the durations of overloaded periods are comparable to (im)patience times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there have been many studies of low skilled call centre operators, research on professional workers in call centres is less common and cross-national research on such operations even rarer. This article compares the labour process experiences of tele-nurses – registered nurses in call centre settings – across three countries: the UK, Australia and Sweden. Using cross-national, comparative ethnographies, through a system, society and dominance (SSD) approach, the article explores the common problems tele-nurses face as well as distinctive societal differences in the ways in which this branch of e-health care is being established. The outcomes reveal both societal diversity and mounting pressures towards a globalizing conformity between the three countries with regard to the working practices of tele-nursing. The findings have important implications for whether or not a professional project can be developed around tele-health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gumushane Universty Electronic Journal of the Faculty of Communication / Gümüshane Üniversitesi Iletisim Fakültesi Elektronik Dergisi is the property of Gumushane Universitesi Iletisim Fakultesi Elektronik Dergisi (e-GIFDER) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Call centers are an indispensable part of many businesses, and their economic role is important and fast growing. To remain competitive, call centers must provide high-quality services while keeping the number of agents and hence labor costs down. It is thus vital to monitor the service level (SL), which is a common measure of the quality of service, and make suitable staffing adjustments. In this paper, we describe an engineering process control strategy to monitor SL. Staffing is adjusted according to changes in SL. An exponentially weighted moving average for SL based on upper and lower limits is determined from historical data and employed to monitor changes in SL during different time intervals so as to keep the frequency of adjustments to a minimum. Only if SL exceeds its lower or upper limit do we increase or decrease the number of agents for a given interval. Numerical tests show that we can strike a balance between SL and staffing by using our proposed method. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To contribute to the management of blended call centers, researchers explored the moderating effects of personality traits and organizational identification on the turnover intention of inbound and outbound agents in a Canadian call center. The results reveal that the level of organizational identification among inbound agents is lower than it is among outbound agents. Contrary to previous research, however, turnover intention among inbound employees was found to be lower than that among outbound employees. The results also illustrate that openness to experience, which serves to reduce turnover intention, is a trait common to both types of call center agents. The finding that two personality traits-conscientiousness and emotional stability-have a positive impact on organizational identification for both inbound and outbound call center agents can be used to improve recruitment selection processes at call centers of all types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a number of studies examined the mechanisms that link high-involvement human resource systems (HIHRS) to organizational performance, few have systematically explained why the adoption of such systems remains limited. Based on a national sample of 247 call center establishments in China, this study investigates an array of organizational and regional characteristics and their impact on the adoption of HIHRS. Our results indicate several findings. First, foreign-invested and local state-owned companies are more likely to adopt HIHRS than private businesses. Second, non-listed firms and those listed on foreign stock exchanges adopt HIHRS more than those listed on Chinese stock exchanges. Third, firms serving high-value customer segments and a large geographic coverage are more likely to adopt HIHRS than those serving low-value, local customers. Last, regional differences moderate the effects of ownership identities and stock market listings on the adoption of HIHRS. Specifically, local state-owned enterprises and private businesses in coastal provinces bear more similarities in adopting HIHRS than they do in inland provinces. We also find that companies listed in Chinese stock markets are more similar to non-listed companies in coastal provinces than in inland provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One challenge related to contact center management involves determining which process best serves customers, inbound or outbound. Such decisions impact the number of service agents available for operations, affecting costs. The size of the call centers market worldwide is estimated to reach $337 billion dollars by 2018. This industry employs 670,000 people in Mexico. A series of equations for calculating the difference in the number of service agents required by the two processes is determined using the direct demo method. Developed theorems and corollary may help simplify decision-making processes. The findings demonstrate that the number of agents required for both processes depends on the percentage of customers served at each location and on service agent occupation rates. The study recommends some best practices to the Mexican call center industry in order to improve its profits and quality within the inbound outbound services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose, develop, and compare new stochastic models for the daily arrival rate in a call center. Following standard practice, the day is divided into time periods of equal length (e.g., 15 or 30 minutes), the arrival rate is assumed random but constant in time in each period, and the arrivals are from a Poisson process, conditional on the rate. The random rate for each period is taken as a deterministic base rate (or expected rate) multiplied by a random busyness factor having mean 1. Models in which the busyness factors are independent across periods, or in which a common busyness factor applies to all periods, have been studied previously. But they are not sufficiently realistic. We examine alternative models for which the busyness factors have some form of dependence across periods. Maximum likelihood parameter estimation for these models is not easy, mainly because the arrival rates themselves are never observed. We develop specialized techniques to perform this estimation. We compare the goodness-of-fit of these models on arrival data from three call centers, both in-sample and out-of-sample. Our models can represent arrivals in many other types of systems as well. Estimating a model for the vector of counts (the number of arrivals in each period) is generally easier than for the vector of rates, because the counts can be observed, but a model for the rates is often more convenient and natural, e.g., for simulation. We examine and provide insight on the relationship between these two types of modeling. In particular, we give explicit formulas for the relationship between the correlation between rates and that between counts in two given periods, and for the variance and dispersion index in a given period. These formulas imply that for a given correlation between the rates, the correlation between the counts is much smaller in low traffic than in high traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study was to examine service providers' behavioral discretion regarding length of service time, and the variables that affect their discretion. Our sample consisted of 225 call center employees. They responded to questionnaires concerning burnout, leader-member exchange (LMX), and perceived service climate. Operational data regarding employees' average call duration in the subsequent 3 months served as proxy of their behavioral discretion. We found that higher service climate and LMX predicted longer call duration, while higher levels of burnout were associated with shorter call duration. Service climate mediated the relationship of LMX with call duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We lack a compelling account of the post-Fordist labor process. When firms can no longer provide secure jobs at good pay, how do they motivate workers? Rather than a return to despotism, this ethnography of call center work documents a novel system of indirect control. New employees are rushed onto the production floor, where their lack of preparation discomfits them and motivates them to play an autonomous learning game. Although initially generative of effort, the game is difficult to master and offers few rewards for sustained participation. Intense effort and high attrition coexist, a management system that the author labels permanent pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical change is an on-going organizational challenge in call centres. While new technologies continually promise enhanced performance, not least by extending managerial control, the implementation of these technologies is an emergent process that requires effort by workers to establish new routines that embed innovations into everyday work. This article considers the role that trust may play in this process. Drawing on a theoretical framework which conceptualizes trust as an organizing principle of organizational activity, and placing this in a wider context where trust may be understood as an element of normative control in the workplace, the role of trust in technical innovation in three healthcare call centres is explored. The research reveals heterogeneous trusting relations between managers, staff and technical systems shaping the process of change and suggests that whilst managerialist efforts to generate trust maybe one element of this, the operation of trust at work is more complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study empirically examines the relationships among perceived organizational support (POS), organizational commitment, and service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), based on a survey of 255 call center customer service representatives at five large call centers in Taiwan. Structure equation modeling was used to examine the hypotheses. The results indicate that POS is positively related to three types of service-oriented OCBs -- loyalty, service delivery, and participation -- and that organizational commitment fully mediates the relationships between POS and service-oriented OCBs. The study suggests that call center managers should seek to enhance the perception of organizational support to customer service representatives in order to increase their commitment to the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a call center, agents may handle calls at different speeds, and also may be more or less successful at resolving customers' inquiries, even when only considering customers calling with similar requests. One common measure of successful call resolution is whether or not the call results in the customer calling back. This presents a natural trade-off between speed and quality, where speed is defined as the average time before an incoming call is answered (the average waiting time) and quality is defined as the percentage of all arriving calls that do not result in callbacks (the call resolution). The relevant control is the routing, that is, the decision concerning which agent should handle an arriving call when more than one agent is available. In an inverted-V model setting, we formulate an optimization problem with the dual performance objective of minimizing average customer waiting time and maximizing the call resolution. We solve this optimization problem asymptotically in the Halfin-Whitt many-server limit regime, interpret its solution as a routing control for the discrete-event system, and show via simulation that the interpreted routing control is on the efficient frontier. In particular, any routing control that has a lower average waiting time (higher call resolution) must also have a lower call resolution (higher average waiting time). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though call centre management has gained increased attention in recent years, call load forecasting for capacity management still offers many opportunities for advancing research and business practice. This paper takes an integrated view of demand forecasting in call centres, so that in addition to the mathematical dimension, we consider three others that are important when designing and implementing a forecasting process, namely, the organizational dimension, people behaviour and information technology. An action research study in a multi-client call centre organization is presented. Our findings allow us to indicate some design principles for the four dimensions (method, organization, people and technology), and we show that simple but rigorous methods, such as the one described in the forecasting framework we develop, can bring substantial improvements. Transparency and understanding of the method by stakeholders are also required; so is a structured process, with clear responsibilities and authorities, as well as enhanced communication and information sharing in order to limit potential conflicts. Finally, information tools should be designed to support the forecasting process through ease of use and formalization of judgemental adjustments, thereby contributing to forecasting accuracy and increasing the credibility of the process outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the issue of agent attrition in call center business. It stresses the importance of Generation Y's participation in the business due to its capabilities and willingness to accept feedback from customers. Moreover, it provides tips on how call centers able to employ potential agents from the Generation Y.

Multi-core based systems are ubiquitous in data centers. Efficient exploitation of hardware parallelism supported by such systems is imperative on multiple fronts: minimizing latency and power consumption and maximizing throughput. This in turn calls for advanced program analysis and optimization. Call graphs have been long used to this end. Although several static call graph extraction techniques have been proposed in the past, these techniques cannot be applied to analyze programs already running in production. Likewise, the existing dynamic call graph extraction tools have limited use in production owing to, say (but not limited to), lack of support for capturing wall clock time spent in functions of a given program and lack of means to analyze the call graph information captured at run time. In this paper, we present a Pin-based dynamic call graph extraction framework called Trin-Trin. The framework enables extraction of complete, precise and dynamic call graphs. Additionally, the framework can be used seamlessly with already running applications. Furthermore, an analytics engine is provided to facilitate advanced program analysis, e.g., different multithreading context(s) of any function can be extracted in a demand-driven fashion. We evaluate the overhead of Trin-Trin using several Unix utilities, applications from the industry-standard SPEC CINT2006, CFP2006 benchmark suite and Yahoo! properties. Additionally, we present a case study to illustrate how Trin-Trin can be used to analyze performance bottlenecks and performance regressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with a general multi-class multi-server priority queueing system with customer priority upgrades. The queueing system has various applications in inventory control, call centers operations, and health care management. Through a novel design of Lyapunov functions, and using matrix-analytic methods, sufficient conditions for the queueing system to be stable or instable are obtained. Bounds on the queue length process are obtained by a sample path method, with the help of an auxiliary queueing system. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the robust design and control of call center systems with flexible interactive voice response (IVR) systems. In a typical call center equipped with an IVR system, customers are handled first by the IVR system, which is a computerized system that often enables customers to self-serve. Those customers whose service cannot be handled by the IVR system are sent to the second stage to be served by agents. To address the design of a call center with a flexible IVR system, we consider a call center whose IVR system can operate in two different service delivery modes that have statistically different outcomes. We formulate a stochastic program to determine the number of agents needed in the second stage as well as the proportion of customers that should be selected for each IVR service mode under different demand levels with the objective of minimizing the total staffing and abandonment costs. We also propose dynamic control policies to achieve the optimal proportions without the knowledge of the exact arrival rate. We show that the staffing levels found by the stochastic program combined with the proposed routing policies are asymptotically optimal in large systems. We present extensive numerical and simulation results to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Call centres have been initiated primarily to reduce organisational cost while simultaneously providing high-quality service. However, it is now well established that the twin objectives of reducing costs per customer transaction and simultaneously encouraging the employees to be quality-oriented are fundamentally contradictory. This contradiction could have serious repercussions for an organisation's survival. In the context of the organisation studied, the imbalance between efficiency and customer service was the primary reason for closure complimented by a lack of resources, poor leadership and weak HR systems. Qualitative interviews with call centre agents impacted by the closure also revealed that the HR practices followed by the management during the process of closure could be labelled as non-socially responsible. Not only was the decision not communicated in advance to the employees, but they were also deprived of their salaries and incentives for the last few months that they worked with the organisation. Nonetheless, given that the closure took place in a buoyant economy most of them were able to find jobs almost immediately in well-established organisations with higher salaries, albeit with the shift of priority from high pay to high job security. The job search criteria used by participants' post-displacement emphasised non-economic criteria, probably providing answers for the problem of high labour turnover rates witnessed in the IT-enabled business services–business process outsourcing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the integer programming approach for dealing with resource allocation problems and employee satisfaction during shift scheduling. The ability to take into account the personal preferences of shift workers has an important impact on employee satisfaction. This paper describes an enhanced approach to this scheduling problem based on operations research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate compensation management in in-house and outsourced call centres with original establishment-level data collected in Canada. Our analysis reveals that both customer service representatives (CSRs) and managers employed in outsourced call centres earn 91 per cent of the cash pay earned by their in-house counterparts. Lower cash pay levels in outsourced call centres are related to higher CSR quit rates and absenteeism. Although CSR cash pay is associated with improved workforce performance, the disparity in cash pay between in-house and outsourced call centres does not result in a significant difference in workforce performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce three discrete time Bayesian state-space models with Poisson measurements, each aiming to address different issues in call center arrival modeling. We present the properties of the models and develop their Bayesian inference. In so doing, we provide sequential updating and smoothing for call arrival rates and discuss how the models can be used for intra-day, inter-day, and inter-week forecasts. We illustrate the implementation of the models by using actual arrival data from a US commercial bank's call center and provide forecasting comparisons. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 58: 28-42, 2011 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the Second Report and Order of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which was released on September 23, 2010. It says that in the report, the FCC revised the benchmarks ofwireless carriers to assist emergency call centers in identifying the location of 911 calls from cellular phones. It notes that it addresses issues including the accuracy standards for handset-based location technologies, and the accuracy standards for network-based location technologies.

Driven by market pressures, financial service firms are increasingly partnering with independent vendors to create service networks that deliver greater profits while ensuring high service quality. In the management of call center networks, these partnerships are common and form an integral part of the customer care and marketing strategies in the financial services industry. For a financial services firm, configuring such a call center service network entails determining which partners to select and how to distribute service requests among vendors, while incorporating their capabilities, costs, and revenue-generating abilities. Motivated by a problem facing a Fortune 500 financial services provider, we develop and apply a novel mixed integer programming model for the service network configuration problem. Our tactical decision support model effectively accounts for the firm's costs by capturing the impact of service requirements on vendor staffing levels and seat requirements, and permits imposing call routing preferences and auxiliary service costs. We implemented the model and applied it to data from an industry partner. Results suggest that our approach can generate considerable cost savings and substantial additional revenues, while ensuring high service quality. Results based on test instances demonstrate similar savings and outperform two rule-based methods for vendor assignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The present paper attempts to integrate three streams of alternative approaches to provide a contingency-based framework to understand the management control systems (MCS) that are operating in call centers. Specifically, the paper''s aim is to analyse the work practices of call center employees from three different lenses: the radical approach using Braverman''s labor process theory; the Foucauldian approach, which explains the governance of the self; and the naturalistic approach, which explains the governance of the built environment. Design/methodology/approach - The data for the case study were collected by conducting interviews. The data were gathered to identify if the work experience of the call center operators reflects the Tayloristic principles of scientific management, whether their responses reflect evidence of internalizing norms and adjusting their selves to fit to the norm, and lastly whether their work conditions are shaped in the manner described above to facilitate control of their work lives. Findings - Prior academic studies have relied on either one of the approaches and the author''s contention is that neither of the theories in isolation can explain the complexities that characterize the contemporary call center operator''s labor process. Research limitations/implications - The study of control and its resistance can add to the understanding of the modern workplace. Since the call center environment is unique, the results of this study may have limited generalizability. Practical implications - Future researchers can extend the approach used in this research to areas other than call centers that may have similar overlapping paradigms. Such an endeavor will enrich the understanding of complex phenomena, where multiple theories may be espoused to explain a particular research question. Originality/value - A significant contribution of this study is to recognize that there is concentration of limited control and power in the hands of those who are controlled. Such an understanding may revive the "emancipatory tradition" of labour process theory and though it may not lead to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, it may lead to the awareness that strategies aimed at improving the lives of workers within the capitalist political economy are desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the problem of staffing call centers that service customers of different classes who are served by agents with varying skills. The traditional management way of analyzing such a problem is formulated as an optimization problem in which the objective is to minimize salary-related costs subject to meeting predetermined quality-of-service goals for each customer class. The article describes a two-step solution for the staffing problem. The first step introduces a random static planning problem and the second step solves a finite number of staffing problems with known arrival rates.

Using survey data for call centre establishments in eight countries, we examine the relationship between wages and human resource practices. High-involvement work design and the use of performance-based pay are significantly positively related to wages, whereas intensive use of performance monitoring is negatively associated with wages. These relationships are larger among liberal economies compared with co-ordinated ones, but individual country differences are large and, in many cases, do not conform to expectations regarding institutional differences between liberal and co-ordinated market economies. The exception is Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the process of and outcomes from work reorganization in US and German call centres, based on four matched case studies in the telecommunications industry. Both German cases adopted high-involvement employment systems with broad skills and worker discretion, while the US cases relied on a narrow division of labour, tight discipline and individual incentives. These outcomes are explained by differences in institutional supports for collective voice. Works councils in the German companies used their stronger participation rights to limit monitoring and encourage upskilling at a time when US managers were rationalizing similar jobs. Findings demonstrate that industrial relations institutions can have a substantial influence on employment systems in work settings characterized by decentralized bargaining and strong cost pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Societes Contemporaines is the property of Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques is the property of Centre Recherches Sociologique and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We consider a multiserver delay queue with finite additional waiting spaces and time-varying arrival rates, where the customers waiting in the buffer may abandon. These are features that arise naturally from the study of service systems such as call centers. Moreover, we assume rewards for successful service completions and cost rates for service resources. Finally, we consider service-level agreements that constrain both the fractions of callers who abandon and the ones who are blocked.Applying the theory of Lagrangian mechanics to the fluid limit of a related Markovian service network model, we obtain near-profit-optimal staffing and provisioning schedules. The nature of this solution consists of three modes of operation. A key step in deriving this solution is combining the modified offered load approximation for loss systems with our fluid model. We use them to estimate effectively both our service-level agreement metrics and the profit for the original queuing model. Second-order profit improvements are achieved through a modified offered load version of the conventional square root safety rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper deals with a Markovian multiserver model, where the simultaneous effect of customer balking, impatience and retrials is evaluated. The study of systems incorporating these features is motivated by the observation of real service systems where these queueing phenomena interact. Simple approximations based on truncation and generalized truncation are provided. These approximations are compared according to different criteria for several selected scenarios. Finally, our results are used to evaluate the optimal ratio between the number of available channels and the number of waiting positions in an application to call center management. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a study which aims to develop a flexible model, by which business processes can be structured, simulated and reengineered cost-effectively, with focus on call centres. It says that the emergence of business process reengineering (BPR) addresses problems in companies within the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. It states that the flexibility and adaptability of a BPR process is efficient to the identification of incompatibilities in modeling and simulation defects. Findings show that the said reengineering processes engage changes in people, processes and technology.

Call centres have, over the past decade, become a central element in the way information services are produced and delivered to the public. Much as automobile factories or textile mills were treated as both objects of curiosity and as metaphors for their age, call centres have garnered attention both in their own right as a new means of organizing particular types of work and as an important venue from which to undertake the study of other elements of management practice, including human resource management. This paper critically examines all aspects of research that has been undertaken on call centres, from the publication of the first novel pieces of research up to the most recent contributions. A good deal of effort has gone into classifying call centres, comparing the organization of work in them with other types of work and considering the extent of variation between call centres. Depending upon the theoretical lens that is used (e.g. labour process theory, high-performance work systems theory, HR perspectives, gender theory, etc.) different aspects of call-centre work are emphasized and different conclusions regarding call-centre employment and its possibilities are reached. These contrasting results are compared and evaluated in this review. It is also the case that the study of call centres invites critical reflection upon theories of management, and this is also entered into in this paper. Additionally, the continuous spread of call centres into new realms of professional work activity and into new spaces of the global economy throws up challenges that are brought to the reader's attention for our understanding of this approach to managing informational work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses training, employee development, and human resource development in European call centres. A description of European call centres is provided including the complexity and importance of such centres in the European economy. Topics include employees who are expected to meet stretch goals and manage emotional pressures. A conceptual framework is proposed that maps the interactions of internal and external influences which explain characteristics associated with training, development, and human resource development (HRD) in call centres.

The article discusses the results of a research article published elsewhere in the issue, then makes conclusions based on the research. The topic of the paper was human resource development and employee training within European call centres. Regardless of the market segment they serve, these call centres place a strong emphasis on process standardization, the article states. Also discussed is the complex context that call centres create for employee training, development, and human resource development (HRD).