Using simulation to predict market behavior for outbound call centers

The call center industry has considerably grown especially the outbound call center area, such as telemarketing. The productivity of the call centers has significantly increased, but they still require improvements especially because of the need to adapt their operations in some countries, like the UK and the USA, in which the silent calls are strictly regulated. For this reason, electronic dialer systems, termed predictive dialers, have been developed. Several of them have achieved good performance only under some special conditions. This paper intends to show how simulation models can be used as a predictive tool to forecast the outbound call center behavior aiming to build up a predictive dialer.