Calls directed to a work group or call center may find everyone busy with other calls and thus be delayed or blocked from receiving service from a person. Minimizing such delays and blocked calls is one of the management goals for such organizations. An important parameter is the percentage of callers that arrive when everyone is busy that is standing by to answer the call. Herein this is referred to as the percent blockage. Another important parameter is the proportion of the work-time that is spent actually communicating with callers as opposed to just waiting for incoming calls. This is sometimes referred to as the percent occupancy (or efficiency).
There is a relationship predictable using the work of the Danish telephone engineer A. K. Erlang (1909 paper) between the size of the service group which is needed to prevent too many unserved (blocked) calls and the percentage of time that the group members are occupied with calls. For a given blocking rate small groups serving small call volumes (particularly those with less than 100 servers) are not able to obtain the efficiency rates of larger groups serving large call volumes: The small group is busy with calls a smaller percent of time. For instance, for 6 servers who in their busiest hour are not able to serve two out of every 100 calls, the percent occupancy based on Erlang's "lost call formula" is 41%. For 100 servers also not able to serve two out of every 100 calls the percent occupancy is 88%.
A primary approach to improving efficiency is to aggregate incoming calls and create large service groups to handle them. Though this method does raise the percent occupancy, it has the disadvantage of being applicable only where there are large call volumes which warrant forming the large work group. Also, even when large work groups are formed there may be a sameness about each transaction which becomes excessively monotonous to the people engaged in the work. This is particularly true if the occupancy goals are supplemented with time per transaction goals which lead to an emphasis on specialization: The further specialization being undertaken to improve the time per transaction performance. Besides being applicable just to larger call volumes, major problems related to the monotony of the work may develop including high turnover costs, high training costs, absenteeism, worker health issues, and unenthusiastic work performance. For the large work group these problems all contribute to losing some of the economies of scale that the group may initially have as well as to diminishing the quality of service provided to callers.
New technologies are being used to improve the occupancy time of human attendants. A mechanized response system may be offered as a substitute for the human attendant, effectively sifting through incoming calls. The total calls per attendant is increased by counting as served these calls which are shuffled over to an associated voice-response information system or to voice mail services or to a system that sends back facsimile messages. In another solution callers may be queued up and experience various waiting times so that from the view of the call station attendant there is usually someone on the line after the last call and the time experienced between callers is shortened. These methods have the disadvantage from the callers' view of introducing delays and providing less information or personal attention at a greater cost in time than may be satisfactory to them. When this happens, rather than improving productivity for the transaction as a whole, these devices just transfer service costs from the called service's organization to the calling organization.
Other problems are encountered in administering traditional call-handling groups. The administrative goal is to handle the call well while balancing the competing objectives of minimizing the number of agents, maximizing the calls per agent, and blocking from service a minimized proportion of calls. The administrative method used is to attempt to predict the requirements for call-handling forces and then try to closely schedule the available forces to match that prediction. These predictions, while essential and helpful, may often fail to satisfactorily estimate the actual future number of calls and call minutes presented to the forces or the number of people actually making up the forces. The result may be an inconsistent level of service and less than optimum balancing of the competing objectives.
Technology is enhancing the abilities of people to handle different situations presented over the telephone or over multimedia networks. In particular, databases of information can be tapped to provide, in a split second, information helpful to serving callers. For instance, for known callers the account number, address, and service, order or billing history can be provided to assist in servicing a call. Likewise companies' customer service systems even flash sales prompts for the attendants suggesting additional related items to callers. Also, the experience with other callers can be captured in other databases and utilized to shorten the problem solving process on a call: in particular, the present caller's situation can often be correlated with successful experiences serving past callers and the successful approach can be rapidly duplicated. Recent services launched by consumer-oriented companies use such databases and expertise repositories.
These mechanized aids can reduce the level of experience required to satisfy callers' requests. With them, incoming callers could be served by people with other regular duties thereby introducing variety and manageable content into the job design. However, the ability to mix and diversify a person's work day tasks by adding the answering of received calls is hampered by a lack of automatic means for balancing the call work with the other work demands of the person who would undertake both.
In summary the drawbacks of present methods can include low efficiency for groups handling small incoming call volumes, limited ability to adjust to sudden barrages of calls, missing customers' calls from momentarily having too few call stations eligible, job designs with excessively monotonous tasks, and difficulties with force level planning and scheduling. Also present methods don't support the mixing of work types--regular work and call work--thereby foregoing the more extensive use of new call support technologies and the added variety and extra scope that could enrich jobs and lead to accompanying benefits from lower turnover and more enthusiastic work performances.