Call Center Delay Announcement Using a Newsvendor-Like Performance Criterion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jouini, Oualid; Aksin, O. Zeynep; Karaesmen, Fikri; Aguir, M. Salah; Dallery, Yves
• 署名单位: Universite Paris Saclay; Koc University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.12259
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 587-604
• 关键词: call center applications; real-time delay approximations; priority; simulation; newsvendor model

摘要

The problem of estimating delays experienced by customers with different priorities, and the determination of the appropriate delay announcement to these customers, in a multi-class call center with time varying parameters, abandonments, and retrials is considered. The system is approximately modeled as an M(t)/M/s(t) queue with priorities, thus ignoring some of the real features like abandonments and retrials. Two delay estimators are proposed and tested in a series of simulation experiments. Making use of actual state-dependent waiting time data from this call center, the delay announcements from the estimated delay distributions that minimize a newsvendor-like cost function are considered. The performance of these announcements is also compared to announcing the mean delay. We find that an Erlang distribution-based estimator performs well for a range of different under-announcement penalty to over-announcement penalty ratios.