Call center offshoring performance management

Abstract

Purpose – This study aims to detect and mitigate opportunistic behavior in call centers through proper performance management and to provide companies considering outsourcing and/or offshoring their call center services with the important performance factors. Design/methodology/approach – The study introduces performance management as an important mediating process affecting BPO performance, and presents insights to the performance management of call centers, particularly related to detecting opportunistic behavior. Building from contractual and agency theory, KPI data from two different companies using two different pricing schemes was analyzed. The data represented 107 weeks under each contract type covering specific Service Level Agreement measures. Findings – The study indicates the importance of having in place a performance management system to manage BPO, and presents the notion of proxies to detect difficult to measure service level performance targets. The study confirms the existence of opportun...