Call Center Outsourcing: Coordinating Staffing Level and Service Quality

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: piece-meal and payper-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...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: MANSCI
• Authors: Z. Justin Ren, Yong-Pin Zhou
• Keywords: MANSCI 2008, Outsourcing Supply Chain, Service Quality, User Company