Contact centers with a call-back option and real-time delay information

Contact centers with a call-back option and real-time delay information

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Article ID: iaor20073617
Country: United States
Volume: 52
Issue: 4
Start Page Number: 527
End Page Number: 545
Publication Date: Jul 2004
Journal: Operations Research
Authors: ,
Keywords: service
Abstract:

Motivated by practices in customer contact centers, we consider a system that ofters two modes of service: real-time and postponed with a delay guarantee. Customers are informed of anticipated delays and select their preferred option of service. The resulting system is a multiclass, multiserver queueing system with state-dependent arrival rates. We propose an estimation scheme for the anticipated real-time delay that is asymptotically correct, and a routing policy that is asymptotically optimal in the sense that it minimizes real-time delay subject to the deadline of the postponed service mode. We also show that our proposed state-dependent scheme performs better than a system in which customers make decisions based on steady-state waiting-time information. Our results are derived using an asymptotic analysis based on ‘many-server’ limits for systems with state-dependent parameters.

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