Optimising Call Centre Performance in a New Business Environment

The Problem:

A major government organisation wanted to investigate the potential of applying new business rules in their call centre operations in an effort to improve their overall service quality. Their call centres, which handle over 2,000,000 calls per year, serve professional agents and the general public, answering questions across a wide range of topics.

The organisation needed to know whether the goals of the new business rules could be achieved through the use of smart configuration of the call centre systems and if so, could those rules be implemented in the existing call centre environment.

The organization wanted to simultaneously achieve different service level targets for the professional agents and the general public. Standard approaches to providing differentiated service levels usually result in (a) neither group achieving the desired target, or (b) the lower priority group being given excessively poor performance. Neither of these were considered to be acceptable.

Solution:

We designed and analysed new call centre routing options that achieve specified target service levels for each group, across a wide range of traffic load profiles, over measurement periods ranging from an hour to a day. We then quantified the robustness of the solution to variability in traffic demand, team sizes, and the mix of calls coming into the call centres.

We showed that the call centre routing options we designed could cut costs in terms of the number of call centre staff, increase robustness to traffic variability, and simultaneously achieve different target service levels for each calling group.

By working with the call centre system and network equipment suppliers to the organisation, we were able to help determine that the new solution was not only good on paper, but implementable in practice.