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

This paper considers the issue of new project staffing in an outsourced call center required to meet a monthly Service Level Agreement. This paper 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. The work shows that during the start up phase of a project, agents experience significant improvements in productivity which reduces the staffing requirements over time. The authors 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.