When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call Center Performance

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Armony, Mor; Gurvich, Itai
• 署名单位: New York University; Northwestern University
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.1090.0281
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 470-488
• 关键词: call centers; Cross-selling; queueing systems; many-server queues; heavy traffic approximations; steady-state analysis

摘要

We study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following questions are addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing), and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while maintaining a prespecified service level target? We tackle these questions by characterizing control and staffing schemes that are asymptotically optimal in the limit, as the system load grows large. Our main finding is that a threshold priority control, in which cross-selling is exercised only if the number of callers in the system is below a certain threshold, is asymptotically optimal in great generality. The asymptotic optimality of threshold priority reduces the staffing problem to a solution of a simple deterministic problem in one regime and to a simple search procedure in another. We show that our joint staffing and control scheme is nearly optimal for large systems. Furthermore, it performs extremely well, even for relatively small systems.