Au cours des dernières années, les centres d'appels ont été introduits avec succès par de nombreuses entreprises axées sur les services comme les banques et les compagnies d'assurance. Ils deviennent le principal point de contact avec les clients, et une partie intégrante de la majorité des sociétés. L'émergence à grande échelle des centres d'appels a créé une source féconde de problèmes de gestion des opérations. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur la question de dimensionnement et définition des emplois du temps dans les centres d'appels. L'objectif de notre travail consiste à développer des analyses qualitatives ainsi que quantitatives, afin de déduire des recommandations utiles aux managers.Nous analysons quatre problèmes qui tiennent compte de l'incertitude sur les paramètres d'arrivée des appels. Le processus d'arrivée des appels est supposé suivre un processus non stationnaire et doublement stochastique avec un taux moyen d'arrivée aléatoire.Dans le premier modèle, nous considérons un centre d’appels avec une seule vacation possible. Les agents traitent en même temps des appels entrants et des tâches de back-office. Ceci permet d’avoir une certaine souplesse pour modifier en temps réel la capacité instantanée de traitement des appels entrants. Nous analysons l'impact de la flexibilité offerte par les charges de travail de back-office.Dans le deuxième modèle, nous considérons un centre d'appels avec plusieurs vacations possibles. Les agents traitent seulement des appels entrants. Dans ce modèle, le dimensionnement initialement établi peut être corrigé au cours de la journée de travail. Nous proposons une approche de programmation stochastique en deux étapes et une approche de programmation réglable robuste pour résoudre le problème d’optimisation. En particulier, nous analysons et montrons l'avantage supplémentaire d'utiliser le réglage dynamique sur les coûts de dimensionnement du centre d’appels. Dans le troisième modèle, nous considérons un autre type d'incertitude supplémentaire, qui est l'incertitude sur la distribution de probabilité d'un paramètre aléatoire. Nous proposons une approche combinant la programmation stochastique et la programmation distributionnellement robuste, et nous évaluons son rendement. Le dernier problème de dimensionnement d’un centre d'appels pour lequel le manager se propose de satisfaire un niveau de service global pour toute la journée au lieu d’un niveau de service objectif par période. Nous permettons également la mise à jour du dimensionnement au cours de la journée. Dans notre analyse, nous montrons en particulier les avantages de l'ajout de la flexibilité de mise à jour, et soulignons l'impact d'avoir une contrainte de service niveau globale sur les performances. / In the past few years, call centers have been introduced with great success by many service-oriented companies such as banks and insurance companies. They become the main point of contact with the customers, and an integral part of the majority of corporations. The large-scale emergence of call centers has created a fertile source of management issues. In this thesis, we focus on the issue of staffing and scheduling of call centers. The objective of our work is to derive both qualitative and quantitative results for practical management.We specifically address the analysis of four problems that take into account the important feature of uncertainty in the call arrival parameters. The call arrival process is assumed to follow a doubly non-stationary stochastic process with a random mean arrival rate.In the first model, we consider a single-shift call center blending inbound calls and back-office jobs. By allowing the possibility of real-time changes in the capacity dealing with inbound calls, we analyze the impact of the flexibility offered by back-office jobs.In the second model, we consider a multi-shift call center with single type of inbound calls, in which the scheduling update is allowed. We propose a two-stage stochastic programming approach and an adjustable robust programming approach to efficiently solve the problem. We also analyze the benefits of using dynamic adjustment on scheduling.In the third model, we consider an additional type of uncertainty, namely the uncertainty on the probability distribution of a random parameter. We propose an approach combining stochastic programming and distributionally robust programming, and evaluate its performance.The last model deals with a call center optimization under a global service level constraint instead of period by period constraints. We again allow scheduling decisions to be updated during the middle of the day. We show the advantages of adding the update flexibility, and point out the impact of having a global service level constraint on performance

Les centres d’appels connaissent un grand succès depuis leur introduction dans les entreprises de service. Ils sont le principal point de contact avec les clients, et une composante essentielle de la majorité des entreprises. L’émergence des centres d’appels à grande échelle a suscité de nombreuses problématiques de management. Dans cette thèse, nous considérons des problématiques de management orientées sur les centres multi‐canaux et multi‐compétences. L’objectif de notre travail est de trouver des résultats qualitatifs et quantitatifs utiles pour le management. Dans la première partie, nous considérons les architectures de centres multi‐compétences à flexibilité limitée. Le contexte est celui de centres d’appels avec des paramètres asymétriques : charge de travail non équilibrée, différents temps de services, prédominance d’une catégorie de clients, taux d’abandons variables et couts élevés de la multi‐compétence. Les architectures les plus connues avec flexibilité limitée comme chaining ne résistent pas à de telles asymétries. Nous proposons une nouvelle architecture, appelée Single Pooling avec seulement deux compétences par agent et nous démontrons son efficience dans diverses situations d’asymétrie. Dans la seconde partie, nous nous intéressons aux problèmes de routage dans les centres d’appels multi‐canaux. Dans le premier projet, nous considérons un centre avec des appels arrivant au fil du temps et des emails présents en nombre illimité. Le service des appels se fait en trois étapes dont la seconde est une pause pour l’agent. Nous cherchons à optimiser le routage des emails. L’objectif est de maximiser le débit d’emails traités sous contrainte de temps d’attente pour les appels. De nombreuses recommandations sont proposées au manager. En particulier, nous démontrons que pour obtenir un routage optimal il est nécessaire de fixer à une valeur extrême au moins l’un des deux paramètres définissant le routage des emails. Dans le second projet, nous étudions une politique de seuil de réservation d’agents pour les appels en réception. Nous considérons un cas général de modèle non stationnaire ou le processus d’arrivée des appels est Poisson non homogène. Le problème d’optimisation est la maximisation du débit de taches en émission sous contrainte de qualité de service sur les appels en réception. Nous proposons une méthode efficiente et facile à implémenter de changement adaptatif de seuil. Cette politique est évaluée en comparaison avec les performances optimales trouvées dans le cas particulier de taux d’arrivée constant, et en comparaison avec d’autres méthodes intuitives de changement adaptatif de seuil dans le cas général non stationnaire. Dans le troisième projet, nous considérons un modèle de centre avec option de rappels. Cette option permet de transformer un appel en réception en un appel en attente d’émission. Le problème d’optimisation est la minimisation du temps d’attente des appels en émission sous contrainte de qualité de service pour les appels en réception. Nous proposons une politique de routage à deux seuils, un sur la réservation d’agents pour les appels en réception et un sur le nombre d’appels en attente d’émission. Nous déterminons une courbe optimale entre ces deux seuils / Call centers have been introduced with great success by many service‐oriented companies. They become the main point of contact with the customer, and an integral part of the majority of corporations. The large‐scale emergence of call centers has created a fertile source of management issues. In this PhD thesis, we focus on various operations management issues of multi‐skill and multichannel call centers. The objective of our work is to derive, both qualitative and quantitative, results for practical management. In the first part, we focus on architectures with limited flexibility for multi‐skill call centers. The context is that of call centers with asymmetric parameters: unbalanced workload, different service requirements, a predominant customer type, unbalanced abandonments and high costs of crosstraining. The most knowing architectures with limited flexibility such as chaining fail against such asymmetry. We propose a new architecture referred to as single pooling with only two skills per agent and we demonstrate its efficiency under various situations of asymmetry. In the second part, we focus on routing problems in multi‐channel call centers. In the first study, we consider a blended call center with calls arriving over time and an infinitely backlogged queue of emails. The call service is characterized by three successive stages where the second one is a break. We focus on the optimization of the email routing to agents. The objective is to maximize the throughput of emails subject to a constraint on the call waiting time. Various guidelines to call center managers are provided. In particular, we prove for the optimal routing that all the time at least one of the two email routing parameters has an extreme value. In the second study, we examine a threshold policy on the reservation of agents for the inbound calls. We study a general non‐stationary model where the call arrival follows a non‐homogeneous Poisson process. The optimization problem consists on maximizing the throughput of outbound tasks under a constraint on the waiting time of inbound calls. We propose an efficient adaptive threshold policy easy to implement. This scheduling policy is evaluated through a comparison with the optimal performance measures found in the case of a constant stationary arrival rate, and also a comparison with other intuitive adaptive threshold policies in the general non‐stationary case. In the third study, we consider a call center model with a call back option, which allows to transform an inbound call into an outbound one. The optimization problem consists on minimizing the expected waiting time of the outbound calls while respecting a service level constraint on the inbound ones. We propose a routing policy with two thresholds, one on the reservation of the agents for inbound calls, and another on the number of waiting outbound calls. A curve relating the two thresholds is determined.

In this thesis an approach to visualize internal behaviour of object oriented software is developed. The runtime information, which can be described as objects calling other objects, is displayed as a graph consisting of nodes and edges. The aim is to design an application in Java, which takes the runtime information in form of an object call graph and visualizes it as a tree and as a force directed view. Therefore, first a data model has to be designed, holding an object call sequence. Furthermore, a discussion about graph definition languages and according tools is made. After this different graph layout algorithms are examined as well as graph displaying tools. Finally, the implementation of this visualization program deals with the combination of these three components graph data extraction, graph layout calculation and graph visualization.

Como votam os legisladores latino-americanos em temas de política externa? Essa pergunta é norteada por um longo debate na literatura especializada acerca da especificidade da política externa em relação às demais políticas públicas e sua influência no comportamento legislativo. Por um lado, argumenta-se uma tendência a um comportamento unificado entre os partidos políticos nos temas internacionais, revelando baixa politização da política externa na arena legislativa. O elevado custo eleitoral de se opor à política externa presidencial, o baixo retorno eleitoral dos temas internacionais e a maior capacidade institucional do Poder Executivo conduzir a política externa do país são alguns dos principais argumentos desta perspectiva analítica. Por outro lado, enfatiza-se a importância dos arranjos e coalizões domésticas na formulação da política externa, apontando semelhança entre os comportamentos legislativos nas arenas doméstica e internacional. A diluição entre a fronteira que divide os assuntos domésticos e internacionais, assim como o crescente efeito distributivo advindo da política externa em economias cada vez mais interdependentes são alguns dos fatores explicativos desta perspectiva teórica. Embora haja grande profusão de estudos acerca do comportamento legislativo na política externa cujo objeto é o caso norte-americano, para o caso dos países latino-americanos ainda há um baixo número de trabalhos empíricos, especialmente aqueles que incluem mais de um caso na análise. Assim, a presente tese analisa as votações nominais em temas de política externa em seis países latino-americanos: Argentina, Brasil, Chie, México, Paraguai e Peru. São dois os principais objetivos. Primeiro, comparar o comportamento legislativo em temas de política externa e doméstica a fim determinar semelhanças e diferenças em alguns aspectos centrais: o nível de unidade partidária, a dimensionalidade dos votos e o nível de conflito interpartidário. Segundo, encontrar os fatores determinantes do voto do legislador latino-americano em temas de política externa. Para tanto, calculamos os índices de Rice dos principais partidos políticos dos seis países, comparando-os com os scores da arena doméstica. Fazemos o uso de técnicas de estimação dos pontos ideais dos legisladores latino-americanos em temas de política externa para determinar o nível de conflito interpartidário e a dimensionalidade das votações. Adicionalmente, analisamos o voto do legislador latino-americano em temas de política comercial por meio de regressão logística, incluindo nos modelos explicativos variáveis correspondentes às características socioeconômicas do distrito eleitoral do legislador. Nossos resultados indicam baixa diferenciação entre os níveis de unidade partidária dos partidos 5 políticos nas arenas doméstica e internacional, além de níveis similares de conflito interpartidário, ainda que haja algumas variações importantes entre os casos. Verificou-se baixa dimensionalidade nas votações de política externa em todos os países, interpretada como a disposição dos partidos políticos no contínuo ideológico direita - esquerda e a dicotomia entre governo e oposição. Finalmente, a análise dos modelos logísticos indica, para o caso específico da política comercial, similaridade nos fatores estruturadores do voto do legislador, mais notadamente a dicotomia entre governo e oposição e a ideologia dos partidos políticos. Concluímos a baixa relevância da especificidade da política externa na influência do comportamento legislativo em plenário, comportamento este muito similar às demais políticas públicas. / How do Latin-American legislators vote in foreign policy issues? The question addresses a long debate in the specialized literature regarding foreign policy specificity among other public policies and its influence on legislative behavior. On one hand, unified behavior among political parties on international issues is argued to be the standard behavior, revealing low polarization in legislative foreign policy decisions. The high costs of opposing presidents foreign policy, the low electoral gains obtained from foreign policy activism and the greater capacity of Executive to conduct international issues are among the main arguments of this perspective. On the other hand, the importance of domestic institutions and coalitions are emphasized as important features of the foreign policy decision-making process, pointing out similarity between legislative behaviors in both arenas. The dilution between domestic and foreign boundaries, as well as the distributive effect from increasing internationalized economies derived from foreign policy choices are some of explanatory features from this theoretical perspective. Although there is a great amount of studies focusing on legislative behavior in foreign policy at the US Congress, there is a lack of empirical research regarding Latin-American countries, especially across cases. The present thesis investigates foreign policy roll call votes of six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru. The main goals are two. First, to compare the legislative behavior in domestic and foreign policies regarding the level of party unity, dimensionality of voting and the level of inter-party conflict. Second, explaining legislative votes in foreign policy. We calculate the rice index for the major political parties of the six countries mentioned above, comparing the scores in both domestic and international arenas. We also apply technics of estimating legislator\'s ideal points to assess the level of inter-party polarization and the dimensionality of foreign policy votes. We argue that there is no significant difference between legislative behaviors regarding the domestic and foreign arenas. Party unity, the level of inter-party polarization and the dimensionality of policy are all quite similar in both domestic and international issues. Our findings also indicate low dimensionality in foreign policy votes interpreted as the ideological position of political parties and the government opposition dichotomy. Finally, the logistic models also indicate ideology and coalition as the main explanatory variables of legislators votes in trade policy. The specific nature of foreign policy does not impact significantly legislative behavior in Latin America.

O Risco Operacional nas instituições financeiras foi normatizado com a Resolução nº 3.380 em 29 de junho de 2006, emitida pelo Conselho Monetário Nacional. Desde então, entidades autorizadas a funcionar pelo Banco Central do Brasil tiveram de adequar suas estruturas e procedimentos com o intuito de aumentar os controles sobre eventos internos e externos à instituição, com a finalidade de reduzir perdas financeiras a partir da mitigação deste tipo de risco. Dessa forma, a presente dissertação tem como objetivo apresentar como um banco comercial precisa agir para adequar seus processos às novas exigências legais diante de um assunto com uma importância tão significativa. Este trabalho, além de apresentar os procedimentos de gestão de riscos em uma entidade, procura também elucidar como o risco operacional, no departamento de Call Center da instituição financeira escolhida, pode afetá-la, no caso da inobservância dos procedimentos a serem adotados com vistas à mitigação das falhas já identificadas e de possíveis ocorrências que possam comprometer a continuidade da organização. Os resultados obtidos na pesquisa mostram que o banco em estudo, em relação a outras instituições financeiras pesquisadas, ainda apresenta-se em uma etapa de desenvolvimento da sua área de gestão de riscos, trabalhando em conformidade com a legislação vigente e buscando aperfeiçoar suas técnicas de identificação e mensuração dos riscos operacionais. / Operational risk in financial institutions was normalized with Resolution No. 3380 on June 29, 2006, issued by the National Monetary Council. Since then, entities authorized to operate by the Central Bank of Brazil had to adapt its structures and procedures in order to tighten controls on internal and external events to the institution, in order to reduce financial losses from this type of risk mitigation. Thus, this paper aims to present as a commercial bank must act to adjust its processes to the new legal requirements before a subject with a very significant importance. This paper, besides presenting the procedures for managing risks in an entity, also seeks to clarify how operational risk, the department's Call Center financial institution chosen may affect it, in the case of a failure of procedures to be adopted in order mitigating the flaws already identified and possible events that could endanger the continuity of the organization. The results obtained from the survey show that the bank under study in relation to other financial institutions surveyed, still comes in a stage of development of their area of risk management, working in accordance with current legislation and seeking to improve their techniques identification and measurement of operational risks.

Submitted by (edna.saturno@ufrpe.br) on 2016-06-02T14:42:25Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Maria do Ceu de Sena Moura.pdf: 2631974 bytes, checksum: 10787c3e80077191fae4235bed863dcf (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T14:42:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Maria do Ceu de Sena Moura.pdf: 2631974 bytes, checksum: 10787c3e80077191fae4235bed863dcf (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-26 / This paper proposes the incorporation of a model using the French Multicriteria Decision Aid ELECTRE TRI in light of management competencies. The axes of Knowledge, Skill and Attitude (KSA) were inserted in to an algorithm as the criteria, while the evaluated employees were treated as alternatives. To model the problem, we conducted an exploratory field study of 101 employees who work in a call center specialized in credit recovery and collection in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. The data collected was subjected to quantitative analysis. The theoretical framework allowed exploring the policies and practices of managing people, managing people in a call center, management competencies, the Multicriteria Decision Aid and ELECTRE TRI. The results indicated that it was possible to perform specific modeling for each type of function. In the group of attendants, it was observed that about 15% of workers demonstrated poor performance. A similar result was observed in 10% of managers. In relation to administrative advisors, it was found that 50% of the professionals interviewed were classified as having low performance on competencies, and the other 50% with high competence, a result that is justified when we stratified the uptime of professionals. The suggested model appears to be a new proposal supporting the process of hiring, firing and training. / O presente trabalho propõe a incorporação de uma modelagem, através do método francês de apoio multicritério ELECTRE TRI à luz da gestão por competências. Os eixos de Conhecimento, Habilidade e Atitude (CHA) foram inseridos no algoritmo como critérios, enquanto que os funcionários avaliados foram tratados como alternativas. Para modelagem do problema, foi conduzida uma pesquisa de campo de caráter exploratório com 101 funcionários que atuam numa empresa de Call Center de Pernambuco, especializada em recuperação de crédito e cobrança. Os dados coletados foram submetidos às análises quantitativas. O embasamento teórico permitiu explorar as políticas e práticas de gestão de pessoas, a gestão de pessoas no Call Center, a gestão por competências, o Apoio Multicritério à Decisão e o ELECTRE TRI. Os resultados indicaram que foi possível realizar modelagens específicas para cada tipo de função. Nos grupos de atendentes, observou-se que cerca de 15% dos trabalhadores demonstraram baixo desempenho. Resultado semelhante foi observado em 10% dos gestores. Quanto aos assessores administrativos, foi constatado que 50% dos profissionais entrevistados foram classificados com baixo desempenho nas competências, e os demais, com competência elevada, resultado que se justifica quando estratificamos o tempo de atividade dos profissionais. O modelo sugerido aparece como uma nova proposta de apoio nos processos de demissão, contratação e treinamentos.

Mobile phones and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications are being progressively used in developing countries to collect voice-based reports about bad governance or poor public service delivery, reported by citizens. Such systems (e.g. Avaaj Otalo, Foroba Blon, etc.) can give an opportunity to rural users in developing countries to easily influence and participate in public affairs. Despite the ongoing efforts on using such solutions, the lack of an efficient system of administration can cause delays in broadcasting the collected reports as quickly as possible, to reach the relevant authorities. This thesis presents the results of a real-world deployment of an administrative functionality for an IVR system called U-Call, used in the Northern districts of Uganda. U-Call Administrative Functionality (UCAF) interacts with the U-Call administrators through mobile phones and gives the moderator access to the registered users. It allows administrators to easily publish and tag audio reports over the Web using their mobile phones. It also uses a semantic tagging module to increase findability and information categorization on the U-Call’s website. After an initial validation and successful evaluation of UCAF in the field, during a trip to Uganda, additional features were incorporated, such as multiple authentication process and dynamic tagging. UCAF and its additional features was succefully delivered to the end user, as part of the  U-Call reporting system. / People’s Voices: Developing Cross Media Services to Promote Citizens Participation in Local Governance Activities

Web 2.0 technologies are increasing in popularity, offering huge possibilities, but also bringing new challenges to language learning classes. In the context of ESL and EFL teaching and learning Web 2.0 technologies, specifically blogs and wikis can be used for teaching collaborative process writing. This study investigates previous research on the use of blogs and wikis as tools for collaborative process writing in the context of ESL/EFL classrooms and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of using blogs and wikis for this purpose as well as tries to investigate how their use in ESL/EFL can be organized. The findings show that there are a number of advantages that speak for using blogs and wikis in ESL/EFL teaching and learning. However, there are also disadvantages that can interfere the successful use of blogs and wikis for collaborative process writing. As to possible ways of using blogs and wikis within ESL/EFL context, effective examples of group and pair work were identified.

The thesis deals with the analysis of the risks of the work of dispatchers of the Emergency care Areión (in czech: Tísňová péče Aerión = TPA) for the elderly people. The aim was to find out what their dispatchers consider to be burdensome and demanding and what, on the contrary, helps them in emergency situations. With the help of idiographic research with emergence, which I analyzed with using the principle of the grounder theory, I tried to answer by the interviews with five respondents how TPA dispatchers perceive their work and workload. Whether they feel competent to communicate and deal with people in crisis and perceive their competencies. What are all the factors and situations in the work, which are burdensome and demanding for the dispatchers and how they deal with such a burden. And finally, what could improve the overall quality of TPA work from the point of view of dispatchers. In the theoretical part I deal with issues of aging and elderly as a target group of TPA social service. Next to the service itself; and the techniques of conducting crisis calls on emergency lines and telephone crisis intervention methods used on trust lines, as two types of work that are most closely resemble to the TPA social service. KEY WORDS: elderly people, emergency care, crisis intervention, call techniques

This thesis aims to contribute to the study of workplace talk, language and gender, and the sociolinguistics of globalization by exploring the phenomenon of ‘linguistic regulation’ in call centres. ‘Linguistic regulation’ refers to the practice, now widespread in the globalized service economy, of codifying and enforcing rules for employees’ use of language in service interactions with customers. Drawing on authentic service interactions from call centres in the UK and Denmark, and interviews and communication material from both those countries as well as Hong Kong and the Philippines, this study shows that linguistic regulation exerts a significant influence on the language used by call centre agents, and suggests that this has implications for all three areas of inquiry. In relation to the study of workplace talk, the findings raise questions about the degree of local management and individual speaker agency that has often been asserted in previous work. In the area of language and gender studies, the finding that female speakers in both countries show a higher degree of compliance with linguistic regulation than male ones is related to ongoing debates about the local variability of gender. It is argued that the field may benefit from supplementing the currently favoured locally-based methods with one which seeks to link linguistic behaviour with supra-local systems of inequality. Finally, in relation to the sociolinguistics of globalization, this thesis documents the existence of a distinct, globally prescribed, call centre style which is culturally marked as North-American. In practice, this style is locally inflected, with British agents exhibiting greater conformity to the prescriptions than their Danish counterparts. It is argued that this may be because the prescribed style conflicts with the Danish cultural preference for ‘getting to the point’. These findings highlight the importance of considering language in the context of a global system. The thesis concludes by considering what the research it is based on may contribute, not only to academic debates in sociolinguistics and the sociology of work, but also to professional discussions within the call centre industry.