The use of simulation in call center optimization (keynote address)

Driving the sweeping changes in today's business world is the growing awareness that managing customer relationships is a key factor affecting bottom-line profits. Today's customers greatly value timely accessibility. This ease of customer access is fast emerging as the critical element of global business strategy. In the not-too-distant future, customers will deal preferentially with those companies that are deemed to be the most accessible. As the " lightning rod " for customer interactions, world-class call centers are the single point of contact for customers. According to research conducted at Purdue University, over 75% of customer interactions will occur through call centers and the Internet by the year 2000. Fueled by tremendous advances in the integration of telephone and computer technologies, call centers have the potential for being a company's most potent weapon for maintaining long-term customer relationships. With the pressure on developing high performance call centers, managers have been challenged to understand their gaps in performance, to relate these gaps to financial consequences , and to optimize the selection of the most cost-effective solutions. We will discuss how simulation is helping to meet these needs. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY JON ANTON is with the Department of Consumer Sciences and Retailing at Purdue University, and he is a researcher in the Purdue Call Center for Customer-Driven Quality. He specializes in enhancing customer service strategy through inbound call centers and teleweb centers along with an intranet and middleware for organizing and delivering company information now stored in limited access databases and legacy systems. Dr. Anton has assisted over 400 companies in the improvement of (a) their customer service strategy and delivery by the design and implementation of inbound and outbound call centers; and (b) the decision-making process of using teleservice providers for maximizing service levels while minimizing costs per call. In August of 1996, Call Center Magazine honored Dr. Anton by selecting him as an Original Pioneer of the emerging call center industry. Dr. Anton has guided corporate executives in strategically repositioning their call centers as robust customer access centers through a combination of reengineering, consolidation , outsourcing, and Web-enablement. The resulting single point of contact for the customer allows business to be conducted anywhere, anytime, and in any form. By better understanding the customer lifetime value, he has developed techniques for calculating the return on investment for customer service initiatives.