(A) study on operations management in distributed and small call centers

Abstract

Nowadays, services are increasingly important to the economy. The service industry has grown significantly, and even companies that fall outside of the service industry are more and more reliant on service-based business. However, in general, the formal representation and modeling of service system is still nascent, largely because of the complexity of modeling people, their knowledge, activities, and intentions. Call center, one of typical service systems, plays an essential role in today’s business world and they are the primary source of contact for customers in many organizations. Since call centers are integral part of almost organizations’ service, call center operations management researches are helpful for scientific management of service in almost industry. In this regard, call centers provide an excellent motivational and training field for service science, a recent discipline concerned with finding ways to increase productivity and innovation in service-related industries by applying scientific means and methods. Therefore, call centers have been focused by both researchers and practitioners for decades. However, although there are plenty of researches on call centers, operations of call center are still evolving as the information and communication technology advances. Hence, for effective operations management, features of individual target call center should be carefully considered. In this thesis, we consider a call center of a Korean public corporation associated with social welfare, and deal with three problems of the call center. First, we introduce the concept and the features of two-stage call center, where incoming calls can be transferred from an agent to other. Although transferring is not uncommon in practical call centers, it has not been dealt with, if any, in the call center operations management literature. We also introduce several call routing structures in two-stage call center. The structures can be used to determine op...