Towards ‘zero abandonments’ in call center performance

The call center industry is a big business in today's global economy. Staffing costs account for over half of a call center's total operations costs. Some large call centers, in practice, operate at very close to maximum capacity, believing that such an operations policy is efficient. However, by operating at levels close to 100% utilization, a call center is ‘living dangerously’. If, for example, call volumes even slightly exceed forecasts, customer calls will queue. As queue lengths and durations increase, customers will tend to abandon their calls. We provide some ‘rule-of-thumb’ formulas that evaluate the cost of abandonments. These formulas may be used to justify an investment in additional agents required to improve the quality of service and reduce abandonments. Standard Erlang-C queueing formulas imply that abandonments can be significantly reduced with a small investment in additional agents. Thus, by improving customer service and hiring additional staff, a call center can improve profitability. We illustrate our analysis with realistic data, based on our work with large-scale customer service centers.