Professor Mor Armony Wins Junior Faculty Interest Group Best Paper Award

NYU Stern Assistant Professor of Operations Management Mor Armony received the 2006 Junior Faculty Interest Group (JFIG) best paper award this fall at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences’ (INFORMS) national meeting in Pittsburgh for her research paper entitled, “When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance.”  Professor Armony shares this honor with co-author Itay Gurvich, a PhD student at Columbia University. 

Their research provides a framework by which both marketing decisions, such as customer segmentation and pricing, and operational decisions, such as staffing and dynamic cross-selling, at call centers may be considered together.  The authors introduce the most favorable pricing, staffing, call sequencing and cross-selling policies according to various forms of customer/caller segmentation.  “Cross-selling, in particular, is an increasingly prevalent practice in call centers,” explains Professor Armony.  “This is largely because it allows firms to segment callers dynamically and customize product offerings accordingly.”  The paper also characterizes how the degree and timing of customer/caller segmentation affect the aforementioned policies and, ultimately, the call center’s bottom line.

The researchers found that optimal staffing levels depend upon anticipated revenues from cross-selling and call/order processing times.  They also discovered that the introduction of cross-selling improves the overall quality of service and that customer segmentation improves results.  “If done correctly, cross-selling can help transform call centers from merely service centers to significant sources of revenue.  Many firms realize this advantage, but if staffing decisions are not made properly, introducing cross-selling can actually hurt quality of service and profitability,” argues Professor Armony.

The JFIG award was established by INFORMS, the largest organization in the world for operations research professionals, in 2001 to promote the career development of tenure track faculty working in operations research and management sciences.  The goals of the paper competition are to encourage research among junior faculty and to increase the visibility of the research.

Gurvich was also awarded the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management student paper award for a follow-up paper entitled, “Cross-Selling in a Call Center with a Heterogeneous Customer Population,” again co-authored by Professor Armony along with Constantinos Maglaras, Philip H. Geier Jr. Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School.