Meta-Analysis of How Call Centers Can Use Lean to Improve Customer Experience

Researchers: John Maleyeff, Canan Gunes Corlu, Danqi Lu, Ningjiang Huang, & Tiange Shen

Call centers play an important role in establishing a long-lasting relationship with the customer. Measured in marketing size, the telemarketing and call center industry represents 25.1 billion USD in revenue in 2020 and is expected to grow 2.3 percent annually. To achieve the goal of cost minimization at a call center, the focus of management efforts tends to be on maximizing the utilization of call center staff and reducing call handling time.

This study combines a meta-analysis of Lean call center operations management efforts with an analysis of call center operations from a queueing theory perspective. First, the study reviews related researches about call center and Lean method to study the relationship between performance metrics and customer satisfaction. For example, the application of Lean in call centers can effectively reduce call waiting time then improve customer satisfaction, which is also the major of customer retention on the brand.

What’s more, this study creates a process map of a generic call center to show wasteful activities in the process and use a simulation model to explore the effect of reducing handling times on waiting times. The result shows that, for instance, removing 20 seconds from service times can decrease the labor utilization from 98% to 94%, with the average customer waiting times decrease from 7 minutes to 2.7 minutes.  Finally, the study identifies typical solutions that have been reported to help increase call center productivity, such as stopping providing sum-up dialogues that were not adding value for the customer.