 Practical scheduling for call center operationsDennis C. Dietz Omega, 2011, vol. 39, issue 5, 550-557 Abstract: A practical spreadsheet-based scheduling method is developed to determine the optimal allocation of service agents to candidate tour types and start times in an inbound call center. A stationary Markovian queueing model with customer abandonment is employed to determine required staffing levels for a sequence of time intervals with varying call volumes, handling times, and relative agent availabilities. These staffing requirements populate a quadratic programming model for determining the distribution of agent tours that will maximize the fraction of offered calls beginning service within a target response time, subject to side constraints on tour type quantities. The optimal distribution is scaled to reflect the total number of scheduled agents, and a near-optimal integer solution is derived using rounding thresholds found by successive one-dimensional searches. This novel approach has been successfully implemented in large service centers at Qwest Communications and could easily be adapted to other operational environments. Keywords: Queueing; Quadratic; programming; Scheduling; Operations; management (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:jomega:v:39:y:2011:i:5:p:550-557 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Omega is currently edited by B. Lev More articles in Omega from Elsevier |
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