Contact-centers and Artificial Intelligence

Ruslan Makrushin talks to “Intellectual Archive” about trends in the advanced contact centers market, the future of their architecture and the application of the artificial intelligence

A emergência dos Contact Centers no Rio Grande do Norte: um ponto nodal na rede de teleatendimento brasileira

As empresas de contact centers são uma realidade recente no contexto brasileiro, e configuram redes corporativas de localizações geográficas interconectadas entre si por ligações materiais e imateriais, sobretudo, fluxos informacionais, que se dispersam no território através de diversas outras ‘‘redes técnicas engendradas no bojo da expansão capitalista’’ (CORRÊA, 1997, p. 108). Perante o exposto, o objetivo do trabalho é compreender a dinâmica que perpassa a emergência das empresas de contact centers no Rio Grande do Norte enquanto um ponto nodal na rede de teleatendimento brasileira. Interesse que parte da constatação do crescimento significativo do número de empresas de teleatendimento no país, e o aumento da participação relativa do setor na geração de emprego e de riquezas, sobretudo a partir de 2005. Para tanto, parte-se da pesquisa bibliográfica e documental, buscando dados sobre a origem e trajetória evolutiva dos contact centers no Brasil, no intuito de identificar a intencionalidade por trás da emergência destas empresas no Rio Grande do Norte. Os resultados obtidos demonstram a importância das políticas neoliberais e das redes infraestruturais na implantação e expansão do setor de teleatendimento brasileiro, determinantes no contexto das estratégias territoriais das empresas, que consistem primordialmente na dispersão para a região Nordeste.

Estimation of the Performance Measures of a Group of Servers Taking into Account Blocking and Call Repetition before and after Server Occupation

The model of a fully available group of servers with a Poisson flow of primary calls and the possibility of losses before and after occupying a free server is considered. Additionally, a call can leave the system because of the aging of transmitted information. After each loss, there is some probability that a customer repeats the call. Such models are seen in the modeling of various telecommunication systems such as emergency information services, call and contact centers, access nodes, etc., functioning in overloading situations. The stationary behavior of the system is described by the infinite-state Markov process. It is shown that stationary characteristics of the model can be calculated with the help of an auxiliary model of the same class but without call repetitions due to losses occurring before and after the occupation of a free server and the aging of transmitted information. The performance measurements of the auxiliary model are calculated by solving a system of state equations using a recursive algorithm based on the concept of the truncation of the used state space. This approach allows significant savings of computer resources to be made by ignoring highly unlikely states in the process of calculation. The error caused by truncation is estimated. The presented numerical examples illustrate the use of the model for the elimination of the negative effects of emergency information service overload based on the filtering of the input flow of calls.

Is Stress in Contact Centers Inevitable?

It is broadly acknowledged that contact center employees are subject to high levels of stress. In this profession, there is a distinction between back-office and front-office employees. In addition, employees may perform duties in various companies with different characteristics (i.e., human resources practices, job characteristics, social support, work–personal life relationship, among others). Thus, this study focuses on the analysis of the contact centers’ (CC) psychosocial work environment and employees’ levels of stress and well-being, seeking to understand whether they change due to the specific nature of the duties they perform and the characteristics of the company. This study involved 1440 participants from 15 companies. The results indicate that front-office and back-office duties influence the perception of some job characteristics and their environment and, consequently, the stress and well-being of these employees. Furthermore, the exhaustion and general well-being of employees are seemingly independent of the duties performed and common to all companies. However, the job characteristics, psychosocial environment and employees’ levels of cynicism, work engagement and general stress were found to change according to the company in which they worked, thus highlighting the need for action in the psychosocial environment of these work duties.

E-Learning for SMEs

This study was aimed to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the e-learning system and distinguish the concepts of e-learning and distance education. The study population included 40 managers from five contact centers, 20 of which comprised a control group that did not undergo specialized training. The companies under consideration were representatives of the Russian domestic market and did not operate abroad. As a result of the experiment, the average number of sales of managers who underwent training increased by 20% in relation to the previous period. In the control group, the number of sales remained the same. In this regard, the introduction of gamification in particular, and e-learning as a whole, can be deemed a useful strategy to improve organizational activity not only in big companies but also in SMEs. Moreover, taking into account the lower cost of online education compared to traditional learning courses, web-based training remains an excellent alternative for SMEs since expenses on its implementation will be fully paid off by the received profit.

An Event-Based Data Warehouse to Support Decisions in Multi-Channel, Multi-Service Contact Centers

Multi-channel contact centers are an increasingly important component of today's business world. They serve as a primary customer-facing channel for firms in many different industries, and employ millions of operators across the globe. During their operation, they generate vast amounts of data, ranging from automatically registered logs to handwritten notes and voice recordings. Unfortunately, in most firms, data of interest is unstructured, and stored in several databases, making their exploitation very hard. This article presents a decision support system for a multi-channel, multi-service contact center for front office business process outsourcing, along with its prospective extension to a decision management system. Its core is an enterprise-wide data warehouse, based on the general concept of an event. The proposed system supports a broad new set of advanced analysis tasks, ranging from operator performance assessment to call-flow simulation and data mining, providing operational and management staff the basis for taking effective operative and strategic decisions.