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In this paper, we study the contracting issues in an outsourcing supply chain consisting of a user company and a call center that does outsourcing work for the user company. We model the call center as a G/G/s queue with customer abandonment. Each call has a revenue potential, and we model the call center's service quality by the percentage of calls resolved (revenue realized). The call center makes two strategic decisions: how many agents to have and how much effort to exert to achieve service quality. We are interested in the contracts the user company can use to induce the call center to both staff and exert effort at levels that are optimal for the outsourcing supply chain (i.e., chain coordination). Two commonly used contracts are analyzed first: piecemeal and pay-per-call-resolved contracts. We show that although they can coordinate the staffing level, the resulting service quality is below system optimum. Then, depending on the observability and contractibility of the call center's effort, we propose two contracts that can coordinate both staffing and effort. These contracts suggest that managers pay close attention to service quality and its contractibility in seeking call center outsourcing.

The spread and use of English as the lingua franca of international business (IB) - \"corporate Englishization\" - has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years but the focus has mostly been on the communication benefits and challenges of using English as a shared language inside multinationals. In this article we examine how English is used externally in the provision of business services and apply a postcolonial perspective to frame our analysis. Drawing on fieldwork in India within the call center units of two outsourcing organizations serving Anglo-American firms, we show how corporate Englishization (1) relies on, and contributes to producing, comprador managerial cadres; (2) serves to construct a transnational intra-linguistic hierarchy of power and privilege; and (3) undercuts own effectiveness by simultaneously eliminating and maintaining the alterity of the \"Other\" through processes of mimicry. We thus show how corporate Englishization does not merely overcome or, conversely, worsen transnational communication problems; it also (re)-produces colonial-style power relations between the \"Anglosphere\" and the \"Rest\". Our analysis deepens our understanding of corporate Englishization and opens a new avenue for postcolonial research on the role of language in IB. Our analysis also advances the field of postcolonial organization studies and has implications for IB scholarship more generally.

The Philippine business process outsourcing (BPO) sector continues to face persistent turnover challenges, yet limited research explains the psychological mechanisms behind employees' decisions to stay or leave. This study examined whether work engagement mediates the relationships between grit, perseverance of effort, consistency of interest, and turnover intention among 260 full-time BPO employees in Metro Manila. Participants completed the Short Grit Scale, the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, and the Turnover Intention Scale. Data were analyzed using the PROCESS macro (Model 4) with 3,000 bootstrap resamples. Results showed that both grit facets significantly predicted work engagement, which in turn predicted lower turnover intention. Indirect effects were significant for both grit facets, supporting a complete mediation model. Findings emphasize that increasing employee engagement and developing perseverance-based skills may serve as effective retention strategies in high-demand service environments.

PurposeOutsourcings always affect crucial supply chain functions concerning flexibility and cost. During the decision to outsource and consider third-party logistics service provider selection, decision-makers need to pay more attention to certain critical outsourcing factors such as coordination, integration and cooperation as these key factors are essential to improve overall supply chain performance. The main purpose of this work is to identify the inter-relations among outsourcing decision factors to highlight the most important and influential factors that should be considered and carefully thought through when making outsourcing sustainable decisions.Design/methodology/approachA two-phased methodology has been used in this study. In the first phase, outsourcing decision factors are identified from existing literature and validated by decision-makers from industry and academia. To understand the influential strength and build a sustainable model, the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method is used. A courier company in the UAE is considered for implementation.FindingsAll identified and validated factors are segregated into two categories (cause and effect). The result shows that the most influential factors are developing strategic alliances, uncertainty and risk mitigation and deficiency of internal resources for a service.Practical implicationsThere are several insights for industry managers and practitioners. The results of the study may help practitioners and logistics managers to make the logistics service sustainable and more efficient for businesses.Originality/valueThis study focusses on a courier company to understand the interdependencies among outsourcing decision factors; this is unique in this field of literature.

The business process outsourcing (BPO) sector is important in managing business especially in a developing country like the Philippines. Call centers are one of the most common type of industries within the BPO sector as they generate 75.1% of its revenues. Given the lack of studies regarding the ergonomic factors in the BPO industry, the goal of this research is to examine the relationships of different ergonomic domains on the job satisfaction and overall productivity of the BPO agents in a customer service or call center industry. The data were gathered through an online survey and the approach used for this study was a variance-based partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with maximum likelihood estimation. Through analysis, it was proven that macro-ergonomics and physical ergonomics have significant effects on the overall productivity of BPO workers, while cognitive and macro-ergonomics have a significant influence on job satisfaction. In addition to this, it was also proven in the study that overall productivity and job satisfaction were significantly associated. This is one of the first studies to investigate and examine the relationship between ergonomic domains and the productivity and job satisfaction of a Filipino BPO or call center worker. The results of this study could be used as a reference for further investigations by future researchers, especially on more ergonomic factors as well as the extrinsic variables that were not covered by the researchers of this paper. In addition to this, the proposed framework might also be adapted and used as a reference for further studies to produce more accurate and updated results.

Call centers are an increasingly important part of today's business world, employing millions of agents across the globe and serving as a primary customer‐facing channel for firms in many different industries. Call centers have been a fertile area for operations management researchers in several domains, including forecasting, capacity planning, queueing, and personnel scheduling. In addition, as telecommunications and information technology have advanced over the past several years, the operational challenges faced by call center managers have become more complicated. Issues associated with human resources management, sales, and marketing have also become increasingly relevant to call center operations and associated academic research. In this paper, we provide a survey of the recent literature on call center operations management. Along with traditional research areas, we pay special attention to new management challenges that have been caused by emerging technologies, to behavioral issues associated with both call center agents and customers, and to the interface between call center operations and sales and marketing. We identify a handful of broad themes for future investigation while also pointing out several very specific research opportunities.

This article examines new patterns of workplace inequality that emerge as transgender people are incorporated into the global labor market. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 transgender call center employees in the Philippines, I develop the concept \"purplecollar labor\" to describe how transgender workers—specifically trans women— are clustered, dispersed, and segregated in the workplace and how their patterned locations in social organizational structures serve a particular value-producing function. These patterned inclusions, I argue, come with explicit and implicit interactional expectations about how \"trans \"should be put to work in the expansion and accumulation of global capital. In this way, the study examines the production and extraction of queer value and the folding of trans women's gendered performances into commercial exchange. Data show how the affective labor of transgender employees is used to help foster productivity, ease workplace tensions, and boost employee morale. This study of transgender employment experiences opens new lines of inquiry for understanding gender inequalities at work, and it builds on scholarship that combines political economy approaches with transgender studies.

Background Obesity and hypertension and their associated health complications disproportionately affect communities of color and people of lower socioeconomic status. Recruitment and retention of these populations in research trials, and retention in weight loss trials has been an ongoing challenge. Methods Be Fit, Be Well was a pragmatic randomized weight loss and hypertension management trial of patients attending one of three community health centers in Boston, Massachusetts. Participants were asked to complete follow-up assessments every 6-months for two years. We describe challenges encountered and strategies implemented to recruit and retain trial participants over the 24-month intervention. We also identify baseline participant characteristics associated with retention status. Retention strategies included financial incentives, contact between assessment visits, building relationships with health center primary care providers (PCPs) and staff, and putting participant convenience first. Results Active refusal rates were low with 130 of 2,631 patients refusing participation (4.9%). Of 474 eligible persons completing telephone screening, 365 (77.0%) completed their baseline visit and were randomized into the study. The study population was predominantly non-Hispanic Black (71.2%), female (68.5%) and reported annual household income of less than $35,000 (70.1%). Recruitment strategies included use of passive approval of potential participants by PCPs, use of part-time staff, and outsourcing calls to a call center. A total of 314 (86.0%) people completed the 24-month visit. Retention levels varied across study visits and intervention condition. Most participants completed three or more visits (69.6%), with 205 (56.2%) completing all four. At 24-months, lower retention was observed for males and the intervention condition. Retention strategies included building strong relationships with clinic staff, flexibility in overcoming participant barriers through use of taxi vouchers, night and weekend appointments, and keeping participants engaged via newsletters and social gatherings. Conclusion We were able to retain 86.0% of participants at 24-months. Recruitment and retention of high percentages of racial/ethnic minorities and lower income samples is possible with planning, coordination with a trusted community setting and staff (e.g. community health centers and RAs), adaptability and building strong relationships. Trial registration Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00661817

PurposeThe companies are struggling to collect invoices due to the decrease in the economic growth. This global trend does not only affect undeveloped countries, but it also has a strong impact on the developed countries. Improving the debt collection process become a significant element to maintain financial stability. The institutions that are specialized on collecting payments, debt collection agencies and their call centers, with their expertise in the field can improve the payment process. Yet, managing evaluating the performance of debt collection agencies is a very hard process that involves uncertainty and imprecision. Performance measurement (PM) is a combination of numerically expressed characteristics which give insight about the success or degree of accomplishment of an activity. PM can be handled in various levels such as individual, team, department or company. The aim of this study is to present a systematic and objective PM method for call centers.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, first an exploratory approach is used to understand the call center measurement problem. Several meetings are done with the representatives of both call center firms and the parent firms that outsource debt collection process. Simultaneously, a broad literature review is conducted. An iterative approach is selected to reach deeper knowledge on the process. New meetings are planned and scope of the literature review has changed based on this iterative approach. After these steps, the problem has been considered as the multi-criteria decision-making problem since more than one criteria should be considered for evaluating the performances of call centers. The result of the literature review and the meetings with experts show that defining the weights for the criteria is very crucial for evaluating the performances accurately. Collecting human judgment for defining the weights of call center criteria necessitates dealing with vagueness and uncertainty. The intuitionistic fuzzy sets excellent tools for representing uncertainty. Interval valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets can easily represent the human judgments. Thus, in this study, an intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria decision making approach is used to design the proposed methodology. Incomplete interval-valued intuitionistic preference relations are used to determine the weights of the indicators aggregating linguistic evaluations of the decision makers.FindingsThe proposed approach provides an objective calculation of performance measurement. In order to provide objectivity, indicator performance functions are proposed for the first time in this study. Nine different functions and related parameters are defined to objectively measure indicator performances.Originality/valueThe paper proposes an objective and easy-to-modify approach for call-center PM, which can be used by call center managers. It presents a new fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method for call center performance evaluation, which can consider the multi-experts' judgments under vagueness and impreciseness, which may be conflicting and incomplete interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy preference relations. Also nine new functions are defined for indicator performance.

This article interrogates the historical and structural conditions that have shaped the transnational reorganisation of labour under late capitalism, with particular attention to the offshoring of US cross-border service outsourcing to Mexico. Focusing on the rapid proliferation of call centres in Mexico – staffed predominantly by deported migrants from the United States, alongside surplus university-educated youth proficient in English – the analysis exposes how restrictive immigration regimes, global wage hierarchies, and platform-mediated managerial practices coalesce to produce a new spatial architecture in a digital labour regime. Drawing on participant observation and centring on the lived experiences of frontline workers, the article demonstrates how digital infrastructures function not only as logistical tools but as mechanisms of control and discipline. These dynamics exemplify the entanglement of migration policy, technological governance, and neoliberal cost-minimisation strategies in forging a flexible, transnational labour regime designed to extract value from Global South workers.