* Ramp up new hires as cheaply as possible
* Keep staff maximally interchangeable and minimally accountable
* Keep their resources as close to oversubscribed as possible
A doctor's office has these same pressures, but on a much smaller scale. It is a big deal for your doctor to hire a new full-time nurse. Patients will interact with staff face-to-face and at length. As busy as the office gets during busy hours, there are prolonged lulls.
Call centers also win several extra problems that a doctor's office doesn't have:
* Terrible continuity across multiple calls
* The need to talk lay people through basic medical testing (ever tried to do tech support for someone who doesn't know how to use a mouse?)
* The personnel management problems of having multiple tiers of support staff.
I don't have any arguments about standardizing medicine. If you reread anything I've written today, I'm in favor of the nurse practitioner model, and I see the problem with relying on full-service medical doctors. I just think call centers are terrible for consumers.
I've called the doctor before (talked to a nurse), and told her my symptoms and asked if I should come in -- they said that if the condition persisted then I should come in, but there were a lot of people with the same flu in the area and rest/fluids would take care of it.
I think the more we can standardize medicine the better, it is a mess of a science. With machine learning and the rapid pace of new sensor development hopefully we'll be able to get more automated care -- that can be reviewed by a doctor/nurse to make sure it's ok.
The economics of call centers are no different than having nurses on staff -- how many people can you treat an hour.