Information Systems Projects in Contact Centers - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 382

enable either the identification of new business
opportunities either the personalization of the
services/products generating more business and
better services.
A multi-disciplinary approach is called for in
order to balance service quality, efficiency and
profitability from the likely conflicting perspec-
tives of users, service-providers, managers and
society (Gans, Koole, & Mandelbaum, 2003;
Mandelbaum & Zeltyn, 2007). Research crosses a
significant number of disciplines from Operational
Research, Statistics, Human Resources Manage-
ment, Psychology and Sociology to Marketing and
Information Systems (Gans et al., 2003).
ICT plays an important role in the Contact
Centers, supporting the operations and data
mining user's information. However, Standish
Group studies indicate low success rates in the
ICT projects (Standish Group, 2006). This situ-
ation represents research opportunities in order
to contribute to improve the success level of the
projects.
In our research we focus on Contact Centers
Information Systems (CCIS) project management.
In order to increase success rate, identify best prac-
tices, create decision processes and, in the future,
prepare standards, it is fundamental to identify
and systematize the concepts used and the key
issues to consider in CCIS project management.
In this way, a framework with the key factors to
be considered in a CCIS project and the charac-
terization made by project managers specialists
in this area was proposed in our previous work.
Because of its growth and development,
Contact Centers' reality is dynamic leading to
the evolution of the framework. To verify frame-
work's actuality, adapt and expand it in order to
keep its usefulness, the present research study
was conducted.
Focus groups are an important approach to
create knowledge. They permit time efficiencies
and to take advantage of possible synergies that
the combined effort of a group will provide.

Taking the characteristics of the reality to study
and our access to it, focus group was choose as
the suitable method to gather empirical data in
the present research.
The result is an expanded and actualized tool
for CCIS project management.
This chapter is organized as follows: the
background section introduces key Contact Cen-
ter's concepts; the following section presents the
existent framework; the research objectives and
design section explains in detail the objectives
of this work. Research design is presented and
justified; data collection and analysis describes
how empirical data was gathered and analyzed;
the reviewed framework, the main contribution
of this paper, presents the resulting framework for
CCIS project management; finally, a summary of
the results is given in last section. Future research
directions are also discussed.

bAckground

Call centres appeared in the middle of eighties
(Cardoso, 2000; Cohen, 1980; Gaballa & Pearce,
1979; Hawkins, Meier, Nainis, & James, 2001)
and they are the predecessors of contact centers.
A call center constitutes a set of resources that
enable the delivery of services via the telephone.
Resources are typically people, the agents that
handle calls, also known as customer service
representatives (CSR), which interact with the
users of the services provided by an organization.
An interaction is a contact between a user
(customer or citizen) and the organization. Call
centers may handle inbound and outbound inter-
actions. Inbound interactions are those initiated
by users requesting some service to the center.
Outbound interactions are those initiated from
within a center.
Call centers use Interactive Voice Response
(IVR), Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
and Skills Based Routing (SBR) and present three
main architectural possibilities.