Staffing a call center with uncertain arrival rate and absenteeism

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Whitt, Ward
• 署名单位: Columbia University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• 发表日期: 2006
• 页码: 88-102
• 关键词: model-parameter uncertainty; contact centers; EMPLOYEE ABSENTEEISM; customer abandonment; fluid models

摘要

This paper proposes simple methods for staffing a single-class call center with uncertain arrival rate and uncertain staffing due to employee absenteeism. The arrival rate and the proportion of servers present are treated as random variables. The basic model is a multi-server queue with customer abandonment, allowing non-exponential service-time and time-to-abandon distributions. The goal is to maximize the expected net return, given throughput benefit and server, customer-abandonment and customer-waiting costs, but attention is also given to the standard deviation of the return. The approach is to approximate the performance and the net return, conditional on the random model-parameter vector, and then uncondition to get the desired results. Two recently-developed approximations are used for the conditional performance measures: first, a deterministic fluid approximation and, second, a numerical algorithm based on a purely Markovian birth-and-death model, having state-dependent death rates.