Modelling and simulation of a telephone call center

Abstract

We consider a system with two types of traffic and two types of agents. Outbound calls are served only by blend agents, whereas inbound calls can be served by either inboundonly or blend agents. Our objective is to allocate a number of agents such that some service requirement is satisfied. We have taken two approaches in analyzing this staffing problem: We developed a simulation model of the call center, which allows us to do a what-if analysis, as well as continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) queueing models, which provide approximations of system performance measures. We describe the simulation model in this paper.

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

“…The key distinction of problems with blending comes from the fact that e-mail calls or callbacks have less urgency and can be inventoried to some extent, relative to phone calls. The call blending problem has led to research on performance evaluation (Bernett, Fischer, and Masi 2002;Pichitlamken et al 2003;Deslauriers et al 2007) and analysis of blending policies (Gans and Zhou 2003;Bhulai and Koole 2003;Armony and Maglaras 2004a,b). Keblis and Chen (2006) consider a staffing problem in a setting with blending as well as "cosourcing," which is defined in the next section.…”

Markov chain models of a telephone call center with call blending

“…In this section, we compare the CTMC performance measures with the results of a realistic simulation model of a Bell Canada call center developed in Deslauriers (2003) and also described in Pichitlamken, Deslauriers, L'Ecuyer, and Avramidis (2003). That model was made as realistic as possible given the information we had and was calibrated so that its behavior (in terms of performance measures) was very close to that of the real system.…”

“…Because the parameter values depend on the day of the week (see Pichitlamken et al 2003 for further discussion), we simulate each day of the week separately; the values given here are for Monday. The inbound service times are gamma distributed with parameters (α i , β i ) in period i.…”

Modeling and Optimization Problems in Contact Centers

“…The salaries of agents account for about 70% of the costs in typical call centers. Discussions of call center issues and models, and extensive reference lists, can be found in [7,23,38,45,48,50], for example.…”