Simulation based decision support for contact centers

Call centers are now experiencing a period of rapid evolution, as new communication technologies have become available, customer expectations have increased, and the strategic importance of customer experience has been recognized. While traditional single-channel call centers proved complex to analyze (the challenges and successes of modelling call centers have been widely published), the modern multi-channel connection centers with concurrent conversations and new technologies bring greater levels of complexity to managerial decision making. This paper presents the output of a current research project exploring simulation based contact center analysis, and suggests how advancing beyond traditional Erlang-C based calculators benefits organizations that need to understand and quantify the impact of change in their customer support business.