Managing the workforce in a multi-site network

Telemarketing, Feb 1994 by Weir, Karen R

For a variety of reasons, many companies today are dispersing their call center operations among multiple sites instead of operating in a single location. Some wish to lower their network transmission costs by locating call centers closer to customer bases. Others may have inherited additional call centers through corporate acquisitions. Still others may want to locate call centers to take advantage of the workforce local to that area, or remain operational in the event of technical problems, storms or other disasters. Whatever the reasons for operating multiple call centers, these companies all face a common problem: how to effectively manage their human resources across geographically dispersed centers.

Managing a multi-site workforce is much like the challenge electrical companies face in maintaining a power grid, in which they must be prepared to reallocate energy in real-time as demand varies from hour to hour and location to location. For call center managers, however, this challenge takes on an added level of complexity, since the resource being managed is not a commodity, but people they can't even see.

There may be as many solutions to handling the staffing requirements of a multi-site call center network as there are corporate needs and philosophies. At one end of the spectrum are call centers that transmit (or network) calls together on a call-by-call basis so that the next call is handled by the agent who has been idle the longest, regardless of location. All network activities are planned from a central site using continually updated data from either a central ACD or ACDs at each site. At the other end of the spectrum are call centers that function completely independently of each other, with call volume forecasting, agent scheduling and performance tracking done independently at each location. Most multi-site organizations fall somewhere between these extremes.

In organizing their call center operations, companies often wrestle with two fundamental issues: 1) how "networked" the sites should be (that is, to what degree they should be connected to share calls) and 2) how centralized workforce control and management should be. The answers to these questions make all the difference in how the workforce will be managed across multiple sites and, ultimately, how well the company can provide the desired level of service to the caller.

As you might expect, there is no simple answer. The extent to which the calls should be networked and/ or the workforce management functions should be centralized depends on several criteria.

First, what costs must be considered? In general, networking enables you to provide a better level of service and/or lower overall personnel costs (more about that later). That advantage, however, may be partly or completely offset by the higher network costs of linking locations. For some companies, like long-distance telephone carriers, network costs are less of an issue. For most firms, though, decisions should reflect a careful analysis of all the costs associated with various degrees of networking.

Second, what are your company's needs and objectives? For example, if you want to make each call center responsible for a certain set of calls (for example, by region or call type), you might choose a less networked arrangement. Conversely, if you prefer that each incoming call be handled by the agent who has been idle the longest or is best able to handle the call, regardless of his or her location or the transmission costs, you would more fully network your centers.

In the past, many companies based their decisions about the degree of centralization and networking largely on politics and changing management criteria that may have had little to do with cost and service quality. As the political balance has shifted within companies, or as new management teams have implemented their philosophies, the pendulum has swung back and forth between centralization and decentralization, networking and no networking. As a result, it's not uncommon to find that a company's call center operations have been reconfigured several times over the years.

Some configuration decisions are based on an overriding business need. Take, for instance, the separate case of a corporation that manages several competing hotel chains and operates a reservations call center for each. Unlike many multi-site operations, this organization cannot simply overflow a delayed call from one site to an idle agent at another site, because a call to one hotel brand might be received by an agent for another brand, thus alienating the hotel franchisees that the company serves. As a result, the company only partially networks its centers: each center handles its own brand's calls, sharing only a small percentage with a small brand-specific group of overflow agents at another site.

Sometimes, too, a company's choices are narrowed by technical limitations, such as a lack of equipment or vendor capabilities, or incompatible ACDs at its various call centers. Although the company may wish to more fully network its centers, the cost of upgrading its equipment may be prohibitive.