Staffing and Control of Instant Messaging Contact Centers

Jun Luo () and Jiheng Zhang ()
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Jun Luo: Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong S.A.R., China
Jiheng Zhang: Department of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong S.A.R., China

Operations Research, 2013, vol. 61, issue 2, 328-343

Abstract: In addition to traditional call centers, many companies have started building a new kind of customer contact center, in which agents communicate with customers via instant messaging (IM) over the Internet rather than phone calls. A distinctive feature of the service centers based on IM is that one agent can serve multiple customers in parallel. We choose to model such a center as a server pool consisting of many limited processor-sharing servers. We characterize the underlying stochastic processes by establishing a fluid approximation in the many-server heavy-traffic regime. The limiting behavior of the stochastic processes is shown to involve a stochastic averaging principle, and the fluid approximation provides insights into the optimal staffing and control for such service centers.

Keywords: many-server queues; limited processor sharing; fluid models; staffing and control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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