Chat Center

There has been enomous study on the call center. MS has special issue on the call center back to 2004. Last week, I found there is potential another variation of call center. I call it chat center. There is a problem after I reinstall my computer. I find email response is too slow. Therefore I choose to chat to solve my problem. I find it is effective way to solve complex problem rather than email and phone. After my case got solved, I begin to ask that representives some questions and get some answer:

Question: How many customer do you serve every day. just curious
Answer: It depends, but as we try to sort and help out each of our
customers, it is normally 12 to 15 customers on an average.
Question: Is it possible that you can serve two or more people at the same
time
Answer: Yes, at times when there are chats waiting we have to attend two
customers at the same time.
Question: As I remember there is checkbox at the beginning to let me import
what kind of questions do I have. Does that mean you can solve all the cases?
Answer: We have all the tools that are needed to resolve all the hardware
issue, every customers issue is different and sometimes almost same.
Question: Just another question, how do you balance between two or more
people at the same time?
Answer: We attend at the maximum 2 customers and that too only if the
volume of chats is too high.
Question: What if both people doing something else so that no one respond
you in time?
Answer: This gives me more time to search and try to find out more
solutions.

Usually each server in the call center can only serve one people. But in the chat center, each server can serve more than one people. But now we cannot assume the service time is exponential. Otherwise your previous service time is useless. It is more like CPU case. But CPU job is deterministic. The order of serve in the CPU may not affect system performance that much. But human being is a totally different story. Which model is good, how to get system performance, how should representives balance service to more than 2 people?

Another application of chat center is MSN messenger. Some companies use msn to serve their customer. This might bring another whole bunch of interesting issues. How to balace of messenger service and current work? When to use messenger, when to use phone?....

We should always keep our eyes open to our daily life.