Operations Analytics: Call Center Optimization

India's service industry has boomed in the past 20 years, and a major chunk of this boom is attributed to the BPO industry in the country. Call centers have made it possible for many foreign companies to cut their costs by outsourcing sales calls to India. Today's call centers face several operational decision making tasks. One of the most common challenges is determining the staffing levels per hour to ensure customer satisfaction and 100% call attendance while also keeping the cost of staffing minimal. The objective of this paper is to analyze the problem of optimal staffing by using deterministic and stochastic operations research techniques. A real life data of call center is taken to formulate and solve the linear programming problem and queuing problem. The optimal solution indicates that at any hour maximum number of staffing staff joining is less than 20 which also minimizes waiting time to zero and queue length of maximum 3 customers per server at a given period.