Designing a Call Center with Impatient Customers

Manufacturing and Service Operations Management - Tập 4 Số 3 - Trang 208-227 - 2002
Ofer Garnett1, Avishai Mandelbaum1, Martin I. Reiman2
1Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel
2BELL LABORATORIES MURRAY HILL , NEW JERSEY, 07974

Tóm tắt

The most common model to support workforce management of telephone call centers is the M/M/N/B model, in particular its special cases M/M/N (Erlang C, which models out busy signals) and M/M/N/N (Erlang B, disallowing waiting). All of these models lack a central prevalent feature, namely, that impatient customers might decide to leave (abandon) before their service begins. In this paper, we analyze the simplest abandonment model, in which customers' patience is exponentially distributed and the system's waiting capacity is unlimited (M/M/N + M). Such a model is both rich and analyzable enough to provide information that is practically important for call-center managers. We first outline a method for exact analysis of the M/M/N + M model, that while numerically tractable is not very insightful. We then proceed with an asymptotic analysis of the M/M/N + M model, in a regime that is appropriate for large call centers (many agents, high efficiency, high service level). Guided by the asymptotic behavior, we derive approximations for performance measures and propose “rules of thumb” for the design of large call centers. We thus add support to the growing acknowledgment that insights from diffusion approximations are directly applicable to management practice.

Từ khóa


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Thông tin xuất bản

Manufacturing and Service Operations Management

Tập 4 Số 3

208-227

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