Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/27189 
Year of Publication: 
2007
Series/Report no.: 
Diskussionsbeitrag No. 379
Publisher: 
Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Hannover
Abstract: 
This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to wait, and that they may retry. A discrete-time modeling approach is used to capture the dynamics of the system due to time-dependent arrival rates. Staffing levels and shift schedules are simultaneously optimized over a set of different approximate realizations of the underlying stochastic processes to consider the randomness of the system. The numerical results indicate that the presented approach works best for medium-sized and large contact centers with skills-based routing of customers for which stochastic queueing models are rarely applicable.
Subjects: 
Call center
contact center
workforce scheduling
shift scheduling
stochastic programming
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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