Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers

Mehrotra, Vijay; Ross, Kevin; Ryder, Geoff; Zhou, Yong‐Pin

doi:10.1287/msom.1110.0349

Cited by 35 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 27 publications

(26 reference statements)

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“…All routing techniques or algorithms used in call distribution follows a baseline routing rule which serves as a benchmark for routing cells [7]. The benchmark routing rule usually followed is the first-come, first serve or longest wait rule.…”

Section: International Journal Of Computer Applications (0975 -8887)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Analysis of Call Routing Rules for Improving Call Centre Operations in Nigeria

Gbemisola¹,

Abiodun²,

Adeniyi³

2017

IJCA

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Routing rules plays a very important role in the services offered by call centres in a competitive environment. For example, a call centre whose priority is to reduce overall mean time to service completion, one might think it best to route calls to agents who can handle it the fastest sometimes even holding a call in queue to wait for that agent to free up rather than routing it to a slower agent. However, this rule does not account for the increase in congestion resulting from repeated phone calls associated with unresolved issues. On the other hand, for a call centre that is primarily focused on call resolution, it seems optimal to route each call type to the agent who can handle it the best, thus holding that call in queue even if other agents are idle and/or become available earlier.However, in an environment where there is significant variability across different agents' resolution probabilities. Routing rules that are based solely on these rates are likely to lead to long queues.This work attempts to determine whether average handling time and call resolution rate are true determinants of operational success of a call centre to reduce waiting queue. It also aim at examining whether emphasis should be on reducing handling time or effective call resolution including the trade-offs between these two criteria. The result emphasizes the trade-offs between Average Speed of Answer (ASA) and Call Resolution (CR) rates and also shows that neither waiting-time nor resolution oriented rules are superior to each other; it is subjectively dependent on the value the call centre places on either of the rule..

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Section: International Journal Of Computer Applications (0975 -8887)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As adapted from [7], our benchmark routing rule will be the First-Come-First-Served/Longest-Wait (FCFS/LW) rule, which we specify as follows.…”

Section: Definition Of Routing Rulementioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Call Routing Rules for Improving Call Centre Operations in Nigeria

Gbemisola¹,

Abiodun²,

Adeniyi³

2017

IJCA

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“…Given the complexity of this problem, most papers resort to finding optimal routing policies in large-scale systems under heavy-traffic conditions; e.g., see Armony (2005), Gurvich and Whitt (2009), Armony and Ward (2010), Armony and Mandelbaum (2010), and references therein. Mehrotra et al (2012) resort to a numerical study to characterize overall performance in terms of customer waiting time and overall resolution rate. In general, these papers show that control decisions can actually benefit from agent heterogeneity, e.g., routing incoming calls to the fastest idle agents reduces customer waiting.…”

Section: Background Positioning In the Literature And Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inter-dependent, heterogeneous, and time-varying service-time distributions in call centers

Ibrahim

L’Ecuyer

Shen

et al. 2016

European Journal of Operational Research

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Traditionally, both researchers and practitioners rely on standard Erlang queueing models to analyze call center operations. Going beyond such simple models has strong implications, as is evidenced by theoretical advances in the recent literature. However, there is very little empirical research to support that body of theoretical work. In this paper, we carry out a large-scale data-based investigation of service times in a call center with many heterogeneous agents and multiple call types. We observe that, for a given call type: (a) the service-time distribution depends strongly on the individual agent, (b) that it changes with time, and (c) that average service times are correlated across successive days or weeks. We develop stochastic models that account for these facts. We compare our models to simpler ones, commonly used in practice, and find that our proposed models have a better goodness-of-fit, both in-sample and out-of-sample. We also perform simulation experiments to show that the choice of model can have a significant impact on the estimates of common measures of quality of service in the call center.

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“…Instead, call centers should offer customers the option to receive a call-back rather than been kept on hold on the queue. In Mehrotra et al (2012), the rules that explicitly emphasize CR rates are:…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Performance Evaluation of Call Resolution Oriented Routing Rules to Enhance Resolution Rates

Sophia¹,

Chiemeke²

2016

IJCA

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In contemporary society, satisfying customer's needs has become a phenomenon seen to be highly inevitable for business that wants to survive in this era of high competition amidst the global financial crisis. A customer's experience during a service encounter consist of two parts namely: the time spent waiting for the service and the service itself. The nature of the service, which is the resolution status, is a major key performance indicator (KPI) to measure the success of a call center. The challenge in the traditional call centres in Nigeria, is the ineffective resolution of calls which causes customers to call back immediately after an interaction with a call center agent. This is because the issue was not resolved in the previous encounter. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the performance results of three Call Resolution (CR) routing rules, using data collected from the call center of a telecommunication organisation Nigeria. The evaluation was conducted using simulation techniques. A sample of 2,000 calls was used for the simulation. Java programs were developed for each of the routing rules because they vary from one approach to another in operation. Results from the simulation gave the performance of all routing rules for CR, non CR, percentages of resolved call and call backs. From the result, we observed that the higher the resolved calls the lower the rate of call backs and vice versa. We also observed that out of the proportion of unresolved calls, a particular number of customers did not call back. The result from the study gave the optimal routing rule to be the Shortest Queue Routing (SQR), which proffered an enhanced call resolution rate and a very low call back rate. The implementation of the SQR as the optimal routing rule, will improve performance of call center management with respect to enhanced CR and reduced call backs.

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Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers

Cited by 35 publications

References 27 publications

Analysis of Call Routing Rules for Improving Call Centre Operations in Nigeria

Analysis of Call Routing Rules for Improving Call Centre Operations in Nigeria

Inter-dependent, heterogeneous, and time-varying service-time distributions in call centers

A Performance Evaluation of Call Resolution Oriented Routing Rules to Enhance Resolution Rates

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