Optimization of Multi-skill Call Centers Contracts and Work-shifts

Cordone, Roberto; Piselli, Andrea; Ravizza, Paolo; Righini, Giovanni

doi:10.1287/serv.3.1.67

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…However, they do not take into consideration the skills of agents. Cordone et al (2011) present a heuristic where the relaxation of an integer program is performed and the variables are manipulated iteratively until an integer result is achieved. The algorithm takes into account the skills of agents and incorporates rest breaks, in addition to balancing the types of employment contracts (full or part-time).…”

Section: Scheduling Of Agents In Call Centersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scheduling of agents in inbound multilingual call centers

Barbosa¹,

Gomes²,

Chaves³

2017

BJO&PM

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This paper presents an Integer Linear Programming model, which enables the scheduling of agents in call centers according to segmentation by skills, as well as the inclusion of labor law restrictions. The results from the experimental application of this method to situations involving real-time problems are presented, wherein the necessary shifts to meet forecasted demand are provided, in addition to an economically optimum combination of agents and skills, generating a solution, which is sufficient to maintain the desired level of service at the lowest cost possible. The approach proposed in this study presents an alternative worthy of consideration, since it is able to successfully incorporate the flexibility of call centers with skills-based routing in an easy-to-implement model that has proven to be effective in experiments conducted in on-the-job settings. Advances in information technology and telecommunications in recent years have increasingly heightened the presence of call centers in the day-to-day of companies and their customers. Call center management should endeavor to achieve a balance between technical performance and economic performance (labour costs, equipment, trunks and rates). It is estimated that 70% of the operating costs of call centers are currently related to labor costs. This paper provides research on how to significantly reduce personnel-related operational costs without negatively affecting the quality of the service.

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Section: Scheduling Of Agents In Call Centersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scheduling of agents in inbound multilingual call centers

Barbosa¹,

Gomes²,

Chaves³

2017

BJO&PM

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“…This forecast describes the expected seasonality of the demand and is assumed to have been obtained in a previous analysis (see Cordone et al 2011).…”

Section: General Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In many cases, simply generating the model exhausts the memory available on a normal PC, while it is impossible to solve in a reasonable time even its continuous relaxation, not to mention the full problem. Our approach in Cordone et al (2011) concerned a much less detailed and much smaller version of this problem. In that version, the operators followed the same shift pattern week after week during the whole time horizon.…”

Section: Constraints (7)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our previous study ( Cordone et al 2011) provided an integrated solution for the two different, but related, sub-problems of defining (1) the optimal mix of labor contracts to stipulate with the operators and (2) the optimal schedule of work shifts of the operators. This paper aims at extending the range of application to a wider set of possible contracts, to take into account the increase in the number of allowed contract types in modern call centers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also extend the time horizon over which the model is solved to take into account some sort of seasonality. The model obtained is significantly harder compared to that studied in Cordone et al (2011). To cope with the increased complexity of the new problem, we introduce a heuristic which exploits the mathematical programming formulation of the problem to decompose it into subproblems, and derive from the continuous relaxation of each sub-problem an integer solution through a multi-level iterative rounding approach.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimal selection of contracts and work shifts in multi-skill call centers

Cordone

Hosteins

Righini

et al. 2014

EURO Journal on Computational Optimization

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This paper deals with the problem of finding the most suitable contracts to be used when hiring the operators of a call center and deciding their optimal working schedule, to optimize the trade-off between the service level provided to the customers and the cost of the personnel. In a previous paper (Cordone et al. 2011), we proposed a heuristic method to quickly build an integer solution from the solution of the continuous relaxation of an integer linear programming model. In this paper, we generalize that model to take into account a much wider class of working contracts, allowing heterogeneous shift patterns, as well as legal constraints related to continuously active working environments. Since our original rounding heuristic cannot be extended to the new model, due to its huge size and to the involved correlations between different sets of integer variables, we introduce a more sophisticated heuristic based on decomposition and on a multi-level iterative structure. We compare the results of this heuristic with those of a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure, both on real-world instances and on realistic random instances.

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An Exact Optimization Approach for Personnel Scheduling Problems in the Call Center Industry

Martins

Pinto

Alves

2023

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Hoje em dia, a importância da indústria dos call centers tem vindo a aumentar, uma vez que estes são um grande meio de comunicação entre as empresas e os respetivos clientes. Nesse sentido, garantir um bom e otimizado escalonamento de pessoal é crucial e traz consigo bastantes vantagens: redução dos custos totais de trabalho, reduzindo excesso de trabalhadores, aumento da satisfação dos empregados, atendendo às suas preferências, e ainda aumento da satisfação dos clientes, apresentando tempos de espera aceitáveis.O problema considerado envolve escalonamento de pessoal num call center que opera 24 horas por dia, 7 dias por semana. Atualmente, o processo de escalonamento é feito manualmente. Assim, o principal objetivo é explorar abordagens de resolução exata para obter soluções que apresentam qualidade preferível às das soluções obtidas até ao momento e para reduzir o tempo gasto em todo o processo.O modelo de otimização proposto é um modelo de Programação Inteira, cujo objectivo é associar turnos de trabalho aos trabalhadores, minimizando o total das penalizações associadas às preferências horárias dos mesmos. O modelo é implementado no ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio 12.7.0.0, utilizando linguagem OPL, e testado com várias instâncias, incluindo instâncias geradas aleatoriamente e instâncias com dados reais. A análise da qualidade do modelo passou pelo estudo computacional da sua relaxação linear, podendo concluir-se que o modelo apresenta um intervalo de integralidade nulo em todas as instâncias testadas. Assim, o modelo proposto é um modelo forte, isto é, um modelo de boa qualidade. De forma a avaliar o desempenho do modelo a resolver instâncias grandes, várias instâncias geradas aletoriamente são testadas utilizando o software ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio 12.10.0.0., apresentando bons resultados computacionais.Palavras-chaves: escalonamento de pessoal, call centers, otimização, programação inteira vii A B S T R A C T Nowadays, the importance of the call center industry is increasing because they are a major mean of communication between organizations and their costumers. So, ensuring good and optimized personnel schedules in call centers is crucial and has several advantages: reduction of total labor costs, reducing overstaffing, employees' satisfaction, meeting their preferences, and costumers' satisfaction, presenting acceptable waiting times.The considered problem concerns personnel scheduling in a 24/7 call center where the scheduling process is done manually. So, the main goal is to explore exact solution approaches in order to obtain solutions whose quality is preferable to the manually achieved ones and to reduce the processing time.The proposed optimization model is an Integer Programming model. The purpose of this model is to assign shifts to workers, while minimizing the total penalization that are associated to employees' time preferences. The model is implemented on ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio 12.7.0.0, using OPL, and tested with various instances, including randomly generated and real-world da...

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Optimization of Multi-skill Call Centers Contracts and Work-shifts

Cited by 11 publications

References 7 publications

Scheduling of agents in inbound multilingual call centers

Scheduling of agents in inbound multilingual call centers

Optimal selection of contracts and work shifts in multi-skill call centers

An Exact Optimization Approach for Personnel Scheduling Problems in the Call Center Industry

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