Information Systems Projects in Contact Centers - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 387

ation, from a perspective of what message
to transmit, how to relate with users, and
what information to provide to the agent,
among others. In turn, operational abilities
include planning, forecasting, dimension-
ing, training, quality monitoring, among
others; or, in other words, everything re-
lated to the industrial component of the
project. Another function is system analy-
sis. All the processes have to be thought
concerning the way information flows and
how they should interact with existent pro-
cesses, demanding a global perspective of
the operations. Human resources depart-
ment support functions like selection, re-
cruiting, training and administrative tasks.
Finally, in-house operations may have a
Contact Center Manager, responsible for
the entire contact center department;

be carefully designed to facilitate users'
life and agents must have a support system
with tools that allow them to efficiently
satisfy present and future users' needs.
These tools belong to CCIS;

• Legislation. Labour and contact center

legislation varies from country to country,
conditioning centers activities and conse-
quently CCIS projects. The Global Contact
Center Report 2007 (Holman et al., 2007),
states substantial differences in the organi-
zation of work and human resource prac-
tices in Contact Centers across countries.
In general national labour market institu-
tions influence management strategies.
Another example is the Do Not Call leg-
islation. In some countries like US, people
can register their telephone number in a Do
Not Call database in order to avoid tele-
marketers. UK legislation is even more
restricting. Labour legislation, work orga-
nization and Do Not Call laws, among oth-
ers, must be considered in the process and
project design.

• User and agent focus. One of the guide-

lines in a CCIS project is users and agents
focus. Usually, users' needs are the main
reason for the existence of one organiza-
tion. When organizations create a contact
center or a new service for a contact center
- in-house or outsourced - all the solution
(marketing and operational components)
are conceived to satisfy users' needs to
strengthen user-organization relationship.
This generates continuous (and probably
growing) purchases and consequently con-
tinuous profits. Agents are organizations'
face to users, so keeping and increasing the
relationship is one of the most important
goals of the contact center. One of the most
frequent approaches in contact center ser-
vice design is the straightforward adoption
of existing processes. The idea is to do the
same things in the same way but using tele-
phone, e-mail, or any other channel. This
approach may lead to a set of independent,
non-related and confusing services, dam-
aging the relationship between the user
and the organization. Thus, processes must

After the framework presentation, our next step
is to introduce the objectives and the methodology
of the research.

Which Are the relevant factors
to consider in A ccis project?

This section introduces several research questions
that triggered the present study and the research
method followed.
Research questions in this work arise from
literature revision, empirical experience gathered
all along almost ten years of fieldwork in the
area and from the observation of the diversity of
CCIS projects.
In the contact center literature, Gans, Koole
and Mandelbaum (Gans & Zhou, 2003) consider
that processes and systems design are one of the
most important and strategic decisions to make