Call center delay announcement using a newsvendor-like performance criterion

• Autores: Oualid Jouini, O. Zeynep Aksin, Fikri Karaesmen, M. Salah Aguir, Yves Dallery
• Localización: Production and Operations Management, ISSN-e 1937-5956, Vol. 24, Nº. 4, 2015, págs. 587-604
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • 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.