The Effects of Customer Misclassification on Cross-Training in Call Centers

Andreas Schwab () and Burak Büke ()
Additional contact information
Andreas Schwab: Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Burak Büke: The University of Edinburgh

A chapter in Operations Research Proceedings 2013, 2014, pp 429-435 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The benefits of cross-training in terms of increasing responsiveness to demand fluctuations have been studied extensively in the literature. In this work, we study another important advantage of cross-training due to customer misclassification, i.e. a caller declares to face a certain problem (e.g. a hardware problem) where in fact another problem persists (e.g. a software problem). In call centers that apply no cross-training, misclassified calls need to be rerouted to agents who are able to serve the true problem, whereas cross-training enables agents to serve different problem types which reduces cycle times. We introduce two-type queueing models to study the effects of customer misclassification on cross-training in call centers. We observe that, if only a third of the agents is cross-trained, high increases in model performance can be confirmed, whereas little benefit is added by higher amounts of cross-training. We also study the effects of routing policies on cycle times.

Keywords: Routing Policy; Problem Identification Phase; Average Cycle Time; Service Time Decreases; Pool Agents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:oprchp:978-3-319-07001-8_58

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319070018

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-07001-8_58

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Operations Research Proceedings from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().