Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mehrotra, Vijay; Ross, Kevin; Ryder, Geoff; Zhou, Yong-Pin
• 署名单位: University of San Francisco; University of California System; University of California Santa Cruz; University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.1110.0349
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 66-81
• 关键词: contact centers; call resolution; skill-based routing; performance management

摘要

In many call centers, agents are trained to handle all arriving calls but exhibit very different performance for the same call type, where we define performance by both the average call handling time and the call resolution probability. In this paper, we explore strategies for determining which calls should be handled by which agents, where these assignments are dynamically determined based on the specific attributes of the agents and/or the current state of the system. We test several routing strategies using data obtained from a medium-sized financial service firm's customer service call centers and present empirical performance results. These results allow us to characterize overall performance in terms of customer waiting time and overall resolution rate, identifying an efficient frontier of routing rules for this contact center.