When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance
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چکیده
We study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following question is addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing) and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while maintaining a pre-specified service level target. We tackle this question by characterizing control and staffing schemes that are asymptotically optimal in the limit, as the system load grows large. Our main finding is that a threshold priority (TP) control, in which cross-selling is exercised only if the number of callers in the system is below a certain threshold, is asymptotically optimal in great generality. The asymptotic optimality of TP reduces the staffing problem to a solution of a simple deterministic problem, in one regime, and to a simple search procedure in another. We show that our joint staffing and control scheme is nearly optimal for large systems. Furthermore, it performs extremely well even for relatively small systems.
منابع مشابه
Technical Appendix for: When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance
In this technical appendix we provide proofs for the various results stated in the manuscript titled: “When promotions meet operations: Cross-selling and its effect on call-center performance”. We start the technical appendix with the construction of the sample paths for all related processes. Specifically, our construction follows a strong approximation approach (see for example [7] and [8]). ...
متن کاملTechnical Appendix for: When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance
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e-companion for: When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance
In this e-companion we provide proofs for some of the results stated in the manuscript titled: “When promotions meet operations: Cross-selling and its effect on call-center performance”. Specifically, we provide the sample path construction under the TP policy (in §A), and the key steps in the proof of Theorem 3.1 under Condition 1 (in §B). Due to space limitations, the proofs of Theorem 3.1 un...
متن کاملTechnical Appendix for: When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call-Center Performance
Here, we use a time change of the processes N7(·) and N5(·) to construct service completions with cross-selling candidates that are followed by actual cross-selling. These two processes are used if the threshold is non-negative. In this case, a service completion is followed by a cross-selling offer whenever the queue is equal to 0 or when it is greater than 0 but smaller than the threshold. We...
متن کاملWhen Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call Center Performance
W study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following questions are addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing), and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while maintaining a prespecified service level target? We tackle these questions by characterizing control and s...
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