Profit-oriented shift scheduling of inbound contact centers with skills-based routing, impatient customers, and retrials

Arbeitspapier

This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to wait, and that they may retry. A discrete-time modeling approach is used to capture the dynamics of the system due to time-dependent arrival rates. Staffing levels and shift schedules are simultaneously optimized over a set of different approximate realizations of the underlying stochastic processes to consider the randomness of the system. The numerical results indicate that the presented approach works best for medium-sized and large contact centers with skills-based routing of customers for which stochastic queueing models are rarely applicable.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Diskussionsbeitrag ; No. 379

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft
• Subject: Call center ; contact center ; workforce scheduling ; shift scheduling ; stochastic programming ; Call Center ; Personaleinsatzplanung ; Warteschlangentheorie ; Mathematische Optimierung ; Stochastischer Prozess ; Theorie

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Helber, Stefan ; Henken, Kirsten
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
• (where): Hannover
• (when): 2007

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/27189
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET