Profit-oriented shift scheduling of inbound contact centers with skills-based routing, impatient customers, and retrials

Stefan Helber () and Kirsten Henken

Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät

Abstract: This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to wait, and that they may retry. A discrete-time modeling approach is used to capture the dynamics of the system due to time-dependent arrival rates. Staffing levels and shift schedules are simultaneously optimized over a set of different approximate realizations of the underlying stochastic processes to consider the randomness of the system. The numerical results indicate that the presented approach works best for medium-sized and large contact centers with skills-based routing of customers for which stochastic queueing models are rarely applicable.

Keywords: Call center; contact center; workforce scheduling; shift scheduling; stochastic programming. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2007-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://diskussionspapiere.wiwi.uni-hannover.de/pdf_bib/dp-379.pdf (application/pdf)

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:han:dpaper:dp-379

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) from Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Heidrich, Christian ().