 Forecasting intraday call arrivals using the seasonal moving average methodDevon K. Barrow Journal of Business Research, 2016, vol. 69, issue 12, 6088-6096 Abstract: Research into time series forecasting for call center management suggests that a forecast based on the simple Seasonal Moving Average (SMA) method outperforms more sophisticated approaches at long horizons where capacity planning decisions are made. However in the short to medium term where decisions concerning the scheduling of agents are required, the SMA method is usually outperformed. This study is the first systematic evaluation of the SMA method across averages of different lengths using call arrival data sampled at different frequencies from 5min to 1h. A hybrid method which combines the strengths of the SMA method and nonlinear data-driven artificial neural networks (ANNs) is proposed to improve short-term accuracy without deteriorating long-term performance. Results of forecasting the intraday call arrivals to banks in the US, UK and Israel indicate that the proposed method outperforms standard benchmarks, and leads to improvements in forecasting accuracy across all horizons. Keywords: Call center arrivals; Time series forecasting; Seasonal average; Univariate methods; Artificial neural networks; Forecast combination (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:69:y:2016:i:12:p:6088-6096 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.06.016 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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