The Modern Call Center: A Multi- Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research Zeynep Aksin • Mor Armony • Vijay Mehrotra College of Administrative Sciences and Economics, Koc University, Rumeli Feneri Yolu, 34450 Sariyer-Istanbul, Turkey Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, West 4th Street, KMC 8 – 62, New York, New York 10012, USA Department of Decision Sciences, College of Business, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, California 94132-1722, USA zaksin@ku.edu.tr • marmony@stern.nyu.edu • vjm@sfsu.edu C all centers are an increasingly important part of today’s business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research. In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities. Key words: call centers; staffing; skill-based routing; personnel scheduling; outsourcing Submissions and Acceptance: Submissions and Acceptance: Received April 2007; revision received October 2007; accepted October 2007. 1. Introduction Virtually all businesses are interested in providing information and assistance to existing and prospective customers. In recent years, the decreased costs of tele- communications and information technology have made it increasingly economical to consolidate such information delivery functions, which led to the emer- gence of groups that specialize in handling customer phone calls. For the vast majority of these groups, their primary function is to receive telephone calls that have been initiated by customers. Such operations, known as “inbound” call centers, are the primary topic of this paper. Inbound call centers are very labor-intensive oper- ations, with the cost of staff members who handle phone calls (also known as “agents”) typically com- prising 60 – 80% of the overall operating budget. In- bound call centers may be physically housed across several different locations, time zones, or countries. Inbound call centers make up a large and growing part of the global economy. Although reliable in- dustry statistics are notoriously hard to come by, the Incoming Call Management Institute (ICMI), a highly reputable industry association, regularly tracks published industry statistics from several sources (www.incoming.com/statistics/demographics. aspx). By 2008, various studies cited by ICMI predict the following: • The United States will have over 47,000 call cen- ters and 2.7 million agents. POMS PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT Vol. 16, No. 6, November-December 2007, pp. 665– 688 doi 10.3401/poms. issn 1059-1478 | 07 | 1606 | 665$1.25 © 2007 Production and Operations Management Society 665