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Call-Routing Schemes for Call-Center Outsourcing

OPIM Department, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Management Science Department, University of Washington Business School, Seattle, Washington 98195-3200
gans{at}wharton.upenn.edu
yongpin{at}u.washington.edu

Companies may choose to outsource parts, but not all, of their call-center operations. In some cases, they classify customers as high or low value, serving the former with their in-house operations and routing the latter to an outsourcer. Typically, they impose service-level constraints on the time each type of customer waits on hold.

This paper considers four schemes for routing low-value calls between the client company and the outsourcer. These schemes vary in the complexity of their routing algorithms, as well as the sophistication of the telephone and information technology infrastructure they require of the two operations. For three of these schemes, this paper provides a direct characterization of system performance. For the fourth, most complex, scheme the paper provides performance bounds for the important special case in which the service requirements of high- and low-value callers are the same. These results allow the systematic comparison of the performance of the various routing schemes. The results suggest that, for clients with large outsourcing requirements, the simpler schemes that require little client-outsourcer coordination can perform very well.

Key Words: call routing; outsourcing; priority routing; call-center staffing; bursty call arrival
History: Received: May 24, 2004; accepted: June 2, 2006.

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