New Project Staffing for Outsourced Call Centers with Global Service Level Agreements

We consider the issue of new project staffing in an outsourced call center required to meet a monthly Service Level Agreement (SLA). We present empirical analysis generated during a field study with a provider of outsourced call center services to illustrate the unique issues related to staffing a new project. Our work shows that during the start-up phase of a project agents experience significant improvements in productivity that reduce the staffing requirements over time. We also find that turnover, which is typically high in a call center environment, may be even higher for a project launch dominated by newly hired agents. These factors interact with the uncertainty of call volumes and talk time to create a difficult hiring challenge. We develop a model that finds the level of hiring with the lowest total expected cost of operation while meeting service level commitments. [<i>Service Science</i>, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]