Establishing telephone-agent staffing levels through economic optimization

The authors developed and implemented an economic-optimization model for telephone-agent staffine at L.L. Bean, a large tele-marketer and mail-order catalog house for quality outdoor sporting goods and apparel. The staffing levels they obtained with economic optimization were very different from those used by the company in the past, when staff size was determined by service-level criteria. For L.L. Bean, the resultant savings were estimated to amount to more than $500,000 per year. In the model, the authors used queuing theory, devised an expected total-cost objective function, and accounting for retrials and potential caller abandonments through a regression model that related the abandonment rates to the telephone-service factor (percentage of calls answered within a predetermined time interval).