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...

In this paper, we analyze the performance of call centers of financial service providers with two levels of support and a time-dependent overflow mechanism. Waiting calls from the front-office queue flow over to the back office, if a waiting-time limit is reached and at least one back-office...

This paper studies outsourcing decisions for a two-level service process in which the first level serves as a gatekeeper for a second level of experts. The objective of the system operator (the client) is to minimize the sum of staffing costs, customer waiting costs, and mistreatment costs due...

Important features to be included in queueing-theoretic models of the call center operation are multiple servers, impatient customers, time-varying arrival process, and operator’s after-call work (ACW). We propose a fluid approximation technique for the queueing model with these features by...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...