Scheduling policies to minimize abandonment costs in infomercial call centers

Sina Ansari, Laurens Debo and Seyed M.R. Iravani

IISE Transactions, 2025, vol. 57, issue 5, 524-540

Abstract: Infomercial call centers answer calls in an order that reduces the number of abandoned calls to minimize lost revenue. We study a multi-class queuing system with a single server and customer abandonment, motivated by the case of infomercial call centers. We fully characterize the structure of the server’s optimal scheduling policy that minimizes the long-run average customer abandonment cost. We show that the optimal service policy is a static priority policy. We derive sufficient conditions under which the so-called bμ–rule is optimal. Under the bμ–rule, it is optimal to give priority to the customer type that has a higher service rate (μ) and higher abandonment cost (b), i.e., higher index bμ. We numerically test the robustness of our proposed policy in more general settings, including multi-server infomercial call centers.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24725854.2024.2331583 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:uiiexx:v:57:y:2025:i:5:p:524-540

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uiie20

DOI: 10.1080/24725854.2024.2331583

Access Statistics for this article

IISE Transactions is currently edited by Jianjun Shi

More articles in IISE Transactions from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().