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The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments traditional operational models are of great value—and at the same time fundamentally limited—in their ability to characterize system performance.
We review the state of research on telephone call centers. We begin with a tutorial on how call centers function and proceed to survey academic research devoted to the management of their operations. We then outline important problems that have not been addressed and identify promising directions for future research.
Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel
gans(wharton.upenn.edu
koole(cs.vu.nl
avim(tx.technion.ac.il
History: Received: September 3, 2002;
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