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

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 call...

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Published in:Manufacturing & service operations management 2012-01, Vol.14 (1), p.66-81
Main Authors: Mehrotra, Vijay, Ross, Kevin, Ryder, Geoff, Zhou, Yong-Pin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business metrics
Call centers
call resolution
contact centers
Customer services
File servers
Operations management
Performance management
Routing
skill-based routing
Studies
Workforce planning
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description 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.
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source EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate; Informs
subjects Business metrics
Call centers
call resolution
contact centers
Customer services
File servers
Operations management
Performance management
Routing
skill-based routing
Studies
Workforce planning
title Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers
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