Jean-Christophe Van den Schrieck, Zeynep Aksin and Philippe Chevalier. Call Center Outsourcing: The Outsourcer Perspective

Abstract. Call center outsourcing, the practice of sharing some or all calls at a client company's call center with a vendor company's call center, is a large industry worldwide.
This paper analyzes such sharing of calls from the outsourcer or vendor company’s perspective. We consider a prevalent practice wherein the client company transfers calls to a vendor whenever its in-house capacity is insufficient. This implies that the vendor receives an overflow process as arrivals from the client. Motivated by a real call center, we further assume that the vendor company does not have access to information about the operations of the client, such as arrival rates or staffing levels of the client. In such a setting, we first illustrate the important effect of the overflow feature of arrivals on the staffing problem at the vendor, which is then shown to be further exacerbated by the lack of information about the client. We propose two approaches to staff the vendor call center that do not require information about the client call center operations, and that take the overflow characteristic of arrivals into account.