Research
Curated academic papers, industry reports, and vendor research with practitioner commentary.
Featured Research
15 PapersThe IT Productivity Paradox: Insights from the NBER
Erik Brynjolfsson
Established that IT investment doesn't reliably produce measurable productivity gains — the same dynamic now playing out in contact center AI investments.
Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers
Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, Nicholas Toman
HBR article establishing that reducing customer effort drives loyalty more than 'delighting' customers — the empirical foundation for effort-based demand elasticity.
Impact of Self-Service Technology in Designing a Service Delivery System
Jinting Wang, Lina Ma, Wen Xue, Yong-Hong Kuo
The most directly relevant academic paper on how self-service technology design interacts with queueing dynamics — published in a top-tier operations management journal.
The Rebound Effect and Energy Efficiency Policy
Kenneth Gillingham, David Rapson, Gernot Wagner
Critical distinction between rebound from costless efficiency improvements vs. policy interventions — essential for correctly sizing AI automation rebound.
Task Switching
Stephen Monsell
Seminal review of cognitive switching costs proving that context-switching degrades performance logarithmically — the basis for the collaborative pool staffing model.
Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World
John D. Sterman
The definitive text on system dynamics modeling, establishing the ten properties of complex systems — all of which apply to contact center automation.
The Contact Center Crossroads: Finding the Right Mix of Humans and AI
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey analysis of millions of interactions finding 50-60% remain transactional while AI will enable 40-50% fewer agents handling 20-30% more calls — with significantly higher complexity.
Mental Capital and Wellbeing: Making the Most of Ourselves in the 21st Century
UK Government Office for Science
Landmark UK government study defining mental capital and wellbeing frameworks, establishing that workplace investment in employee wellbeing returns 2.5-3.5x BCR.
The Regulation of Queue Size by Levying Tolls
P. Naor
The foundational 1969 paper establishing that customers observe queue length and make rational joining decisions — the origin of strategic queueing theory.
Rational Queueing
Refael Hassin
Foundational text on strategic customer behavior in queues — proving that arrival rates are endogenous to system state, not exogenous as Erlang assumes.
Elasticities of Road Traffic and Fuel Consumption with Respect to Price and Income
Phil Goodwin, Joyce Dargay, Mark Hanly
Meta-analysis establishing that long-run demand elasticities are 2-3x short-run elasticities — the basis for modeling savings decay over time in workforce planning.
Empirical Estimates of the Direct Rebound Effect: A Review
Steve Sorrell
Definitive meta-review of rebound effect magnitudes across energy domains, providing the empirical basis for sizing demand rebound in service operations.
Jevons Paradox and the Myth of Resource Efficiency Improvements
John M. Polimeni, Kozo Mayumi, Mario Giampietro, Blake Alcott
Comprehensive treatment of Jevons Paradox — efficiency gains increasing total consumption — with applications across energy, technology, and resource economics.
The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities
Gilles Duranton, Matthew A. Turner
Landmark study proving that highway capacity expansion induces proportional traffic growth — the empirical foundation for understanding demand rebound in service operations.
Generative AI at Work
Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, Lindsey R. Raymond
First large-scale study of generative AI's impact on customer service workers, showing 14% average productivity gains with 34% improvement for novice workers.