Unintended side effects of telesales campaigns

["Akkermans, Henk"]

Dear SD Community,

I am currently writing an article describing a modelling study I was
involved in some time ago in which unintended side effects of telesales
campaigns were an important phenomenon.

What happened in reality as well as in the model is that, as such a
telesales campaign started, work levels would rise in the downstream
processes (this was in telecom services). As workloads rose for the
employees involved in the installation of new services, the quality of their
work output would deteriorate (i.e. error levels rose). As a result, rework
increased, which further increased workloads. But, most importantly,
customers would start calling the phone company to complain or find out what
was happening. Soon the sales department would be swamped with calls - then
the rest of the departments as employees started calling other departments
to find out for themselves what had gone wrong. Workloads would go through
the roof everywhere and quality would reach an all-time low. An unintended
side effect indeed.

My query now is for literature that describes similar phenomena. My aim is
to be able to make some claim that this model was not just a neat model for
a single company and thats that, but that it is actually generic to such an
extent that it can be seen as a specific example of a broader class of
issues ofr many companies. This could be (and most probably will be) SD
literature but, even more importantly, it would help to find non-SD
literature from operations management or marketing, from cognitive
psychology or service management. Articles in the popular press on similar
horror stories would be excellent as well, just as long as it is in the
public domain.

Does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks very much in advance,

Henk Akkermans
Henk.Akkermans@nl.origin-it.com