Improving Right Party Contact Rates at Outbound Call Centers

Consumer delinquencies are a major problem for banks and other credit card issuers. These firms have collection centers across the country to collect outstanding balances from delinquent accounts. Their main strategy is to first send reminder notices and, if that does not work, to telephone delinquent customers and request payment. The latter often becomes necessary, resulting in high costs of collection. Automated dialers are used to make the calls, and when the call goes through, it is directed to one of several hundred associates manning computer workstations. In this operation, it is important to contact the account holder in order to discuss payment options. Simply getting someone on the line is not sufficient, because such calls would require follow‐up calls. The objective of efficient collections is to maximize dollars collected while minimizing costs, which generally translates to making a “right party contact (RPC)” in the minimum number of attempts. We developed and tested an algorithm that increased the RPC rates by over 10%. This increase translates to annual savings of several million dollars for an average credit card company. Although the focus of our paper is collections, the methodology developed is equally applicable for improving telemarketing efficiency.     

丝绸之路上的语言接触和文化扩散

在中国境内,近一个世纪以来发掘的语言事实和文献表明,在古丝绸之路上,仍然有许多没有完全解开的历史谜团值得进一步讨论.本文拟对其中一些问题发表个人的看法,以抛砖引玉.     

凹圆弧底从动件凸轮机构的研究

根据赫兹应力理论,提出了一种从动件接触面形状为凹圆弧底的新型盘状凸轮机构。本文就这种新型凸轮机构的理论基础、凸轮轮廓曲线的作图法与解析法设计步骤、有关基本尺寸参数的选定等问题,进行了详细论述,并通过实例计算证明了此种新型凸轮机构能够显著降低接触应力,减少磨损,延长寿命,因此较传统的凸轮机构更加适合现代机械高速重载的要求。     

关于上海“四个中心”建设的若干思考

"创新驱动,转型发展",最终要服务的是上海的"四个中心"建设。上海通过制度创新,推动了金融、贸易、航运"三个中心"的建设,但不能说上海的制度创新推动了经济中心的建设,因为金融、贸易、航运都是服务业,把信息技术加进去就是现代服务业;上海要成为"四个中心",还必须通过科技创新发展先进制造业、发展实体经济,而发展实体经济,更要注重发展文化创意产业,发展绿色经济、平台经济、健康经济,发展智能制造业。     

Upward contacts in everyday life: Benefits of reaching hierarchical relations in ego-centered networks

Recent studies have inspired inquiries about what circumstances allow people to gain from interactions with those who rank higher than themselves in the social hierarchy. We examine how self-reported benefits of such upward contacts vary by tie strength and network structures in everyday life. Data were drawn from contact diaries that 137 individuals recorded over seven months in 2014; these diaries captured unique features of 94,353 one-on-one contacts that 137 diary keepers made, along with the estimated tie strength and the extent of embeddedness among network members. Multilevel models with interaction terms show that diary keepers benefit from contacts with people who play higher hierarchical roles and that the benefits become more substantial when the higher-ranked others are weakly tied to the diary keepers and connected with fewer fellow network members. The paper extends contact diary studies to estimate alter-alter ties that help construct comprehensive structures in egocentric networks.     

Creating caring institutions for community informatics

This paper explores the potential affordances of applying a feminist ethics of care approach to community informatics practices in public internet access facilities. As feminist technology scholars have long observed, technology and technoculture are strongly encoded as masculine, privileging traits such as scientific knowledge, rationality, objectivity, and distance. These characteristics are expressed in traditional infomediary practices in a variety of ways, including notions of expertise, ways of conceptualizing technology, emphasis on skills attainment, and deficit-based models of user behavior. In contrast, ethics of care emphasizes the importance of relational and situated knowledge, pluralistic voices and experiences, and relationships bound by mutual interdependence. Traditionally, caring has been feminized and thus necessarily excluded from technoculture and relegated to invisible and unpaid labor. Caring and associated affective labor practices remain an under-examined subject in infomediary practices. Public libraries and community technology centers are logical places to explore for care work, given that they share many characteristics of the spaces where care work has historically been performed. We argue that an ethics of care framework has several possible affordances for infomediary practices in these institutions, including highlighting the gendered power dynamics that define and shape existing practices; distributing care work and making existing care work visible; and envisioning a more holistic and ethical approach to engaging diverse publics. We translate Tronto’s seven warning signs for ‘bad care’ in institutions into seven positive guidelines for providing ‘good care’ in public internet access facilities, then contextualize these for community informatics institutions and practices.     

论近代城市成为区域发展的管理中心

从历史上看,中国城市自产生之日起就与权力政治结合在一起,大大小小的城市都是各级地方政权所在地和各级统治阶级管理一个地区的大本营。一般来说,城市行政地位越高,对周围地区管理控制范围也越宽。近代以来,随着国内外政治经济环境的变化,城市作为区域管理中心对区域社会经济活动控制力度呈进一步加强态势。     

Value-Based Routing and Preference-Based Routing in Customer Contact Centers

Telephone call centers and their generalizations—customer contact centers—usually handle several types of customer service requests (calls). Since customer service representatives (agents) have different call-handling abilities and are typically cross-trained in multiple skills, contact centers exploit skill-based routing (SBR) to assign calls to appropriate agents, aiming to respond properly as well as promptly. Established agent-staffing and SBR algorithms ensure that agents have the required call-handling skills and that call routing is performed so that constraints are met for standard congestion measures, such as the percentage of calls of each type that abandon before starting service and the percentage of answered calls of each type that are delayed more than a specified number of seconds. We propose going beyond traditional congestion measures to focus on the expected value derived from having particular agents handle various calls. Expected value might represent expected revenue or the likelihood of first-call resolution. Value might also reflect agent call-handling preferences. We show how value-based routing (VBR) and preference-based routing (PBR) can be introduced in the context of an existing SBR framework, based on static-priority routing using a highly-structured priority matrix, so that constraints are still met for standard congestion measures. Since an existing SBR framework is used to implement VBR and PBR, it is not necessary to replace the automatic call distributor (ACD). We show how mathematical programming can be used, with established staffing requirements, to find a desirable priority matrix. We select the priority matrix to use during a specified time interval (e.g., 30-minute period) by maximizing the total expected value over that time interval, subject to staffing constraints.     

基于环境角度的双层选址优化模型

本文通过建立以政府为上层,物流企业为下层的双层优化模型,对政府如何制定环境政策、企业在政府的政策指导下如何确定既保护环境,又能降低物流配送成本的选址方案进行了讨论。最后,文章通过一个实例说明了所建模型的适用性。     

Stigma of ink: Tattoo attitudes among college students

We test a structural equations model of stigma against tattooed persons and attitudes toward future tattoos among 195 tattooed and 257 non-tattooed college students. Having tattooed friends and family members undermines stigma against tattooed persons while beliefs about negative side effects of tattooing reinforces stigma assignment. The variables above and the respondent having a tattoo predict attitude toward future tattoos. We test a second model, stigma victimization, drawing on data from the 195 tattooed respondents. While greater tattoo abundance results in greater stigma victimization, respondents with more tattoos also report a greater commitment to their current tattoos and less desire for removal. We discuss results using attitude theory, stigma theory, and the contact theory of prejudice.