Andy, as an avid reader of your blog, I was very interested in your post regarding the challenges of random call arrival and random resource arrival in contact center operations. These well-known issues have been the bane of contact center managers’ existence since the first ACD was installed in 1974. Add multi-channel multi-segments and multiple sites, and you have big issues on your hands.

A few years back, several of my Avaya colleagues added yet another layer of complexity to the randomness reality - they invented skills based routing. With the best of intentions, they further stratified the contact center workforce. Agents were given the opportunity to further define specific talents and expertise on behalf of the business.

In practice, even the best of intentions became challenging due to the exact issue Dr. Frei brings up - the randomness of the arrival of demand and resources putting the goal of specific service outcomes at risk.

Fortunately, a breakthrough was identified by a team of some of the most prolific inventors in the call center business. This breakthrough essentially de-randomized service outcomes by applying a series of ingenious predictors at key stages of a servicing event, the most critical being applied at the moment of an agent's availability. This tipping point was commercialized under the brand Avaya Business Advocate and stands as the most powerful resources allocation software in production today.

Einstein was famous for stating that "we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Fortunately for our industry, randomness is no longer one of the issues we must run from. Thanks to Derek Flockhart, Eugene Mathews, Robin Foster, and Joylee Kohler for their refusal to let randomness defeat the delivery of great customer service.