Announcing Delay Information to Improve Service in a Call Center With Repeat Customers

Designing a Call Center with Impatient Customers

T he 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 ana...

Tandem queueing system with impatient customers as a model of call center with Interactive Voice Response

A tandem queueing system with a Markovian Arrival Process (MAP) useful in modeling a call center with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is investigated. The first stage has a finite number of servers without buffer while the second stage of the tandem has a finite buffer and a finite number of servers. The service time at the first (second) stage has an exponential (phase type) distribution. A s...

Working with Customers to Improve Regulation

Optimal Control of Service Rate in a Service Center with Lapse (Research Note)

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of a particular control doctrine applied to the service mechanism of a queuing process with lapse. It is assumed that the service discipline is FCFS (first come, first served), arrival process is Poisson, service time distribution is exponential, service process is one phase and the capacity is infinite. It is also assumed that the customer may...

A Queuing Model of the N-design Multi-skill Call Center with Impatient Customers

This paper studies a queuing model of the N-design multi-skill call center. In this model, there are two types of customers and two server groups who have different skills. Group 1 consists of specialized servers who can only serve one type of customers, Group 2 consists of flexible servers who can serve both two types of customers. The customers waiting for the service in the queue may leave t...