Workforce Scheduling in Inbound Customer Call Centres with a Case Study

Call centres are an important tool businesses use to interact with their customers. Their efficiency is especially significant, since long queuing times can reduce customer satisfaction. Assembling the call centre work schedule is a complex task that needs to take various and often mutually conflicting goals into account. In this paper, we present a workforce scheduling system suited for small to medium call centres and adjusted to the needs of a real-world example. The demand is forecasted based on data gathered from the call activity history and the staff schedule is constructed using a GRASP metaheuristic. The scheduling problem is to minimise the difference between allocated and forecasted number of staff members while also caring for numerous legal and organisational constraints as well as staff preferences. Additionally, a flexible constraint handling framework is devised to enable rapid prototyping methodology used during the development. Algorithm performance analysis on several realistic problem examples is provided. The devised system is successfully implemented in a real world setting of (Anonymised financial institutions).