A DEA APPROACH FOR PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF CALL CENTRE AGENTS

A call centre is, in general, an organizational unit of a company, which handles a huge volume of telephone calls, especially for taking orders and providing customer service. The origins of call centres date back to the 1960s and are linked to the UK-based Birmingham Press and Mail, which installed Private Automated Business Exchanges (PABX) to have agents dealing with the customer contacts. The call centres we know today started along with the invention of the Automated Call Distributor (ACD) technology, which uses algorithms to filter through calls, and allocate the right calls to the right call centre agents, based on some pre-set rules. As more and more companies are aware of the importance of retaining their customers, more attention is being paid to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. As CRM has become the centre of companies’ attention, call centres, which are at the forefront of the CRM strategy, are regarded as important communication channels between the company and its customers.