Intelligent Procedures for Intra‐Day Updating of Call Center Agent Schedules

Abstract

For nearly all call centers, agent schedules are typically created several days or weeks before the time that agents report to work. After schedules are created, call center resource managers receive additional information that can affect forecasted workload and resource availability. In particular, there is significant evidence, both among practitioners and in the research literature, suggesting that actual call arrival volumes early in a scheduling period (typically an individual day or week) can provide valuable information about the call arrival pattern later in the same scheduling period. In this paper, we develop a flexible and powerful heuristic framework for managers to make intra‐day resource adjustment decisions that take into account updated call forecasts, updated agent requirements, existing agent schedules, agents' schedule flexibility, and associated incremental labor costs. We demonstrate the value of this methodology in managing the trade‐off between labor costs and service levels to best meet variable rates of demand for service, using data from an actual call center.

The Modern Call Center: A Multi‐Disciplinary Perspective on Operations Management Research

“…In particular, this type of bidding mechanism suggests a method for pricing services for part-time "work at home" agents, while also facilitating real-time schedule adjustments as a result of updated call forecasts. The issue of real-time schedule adjustments in service operations has also been addressed by Hur, Mabert, and Bretthauer (2004), Easton and Goodale (2005), and Mehrotra, Ozluk, and Saltzman (2006).…”

Forecasting Call Center Arrivals: Fixed-Effects, Mixed-Effects, and Bivariate Models

“…For within-day updates, we also consider a simple adjustment (not shown in Table 5) of the FE model's forecasts. In particular, we implement the historical proportions method described in Mehrotra et al (2010) and used in Shen and Huang (2008b). For a given updating time point, m, we compute the ratio between the square-root transformed count up to m and the forecasted count up to m, and use this ratio to update forecasts for the remaining half-hour periods after m.…”

Interday Forecasting and Intraday Updating of Call Center Arrivals

“…Easton and Goodale (2005) model absence recovery problems for service operations. In the context of call centers, Mehrotra et al (2006) study in details intraday rescheduling of agent schedules and demonstrate its value.…”