The present study proposes the classical and Bayesian treatment to the estimation problem of parameters of a k-components load-sharing parallel system in which some of the components follow a constant failure-rate and the remaining follow a linearly increasing failure-rate. In the classical...

We conduct a field study in a U.S. health insurance firm to examine how product customization affects the firm's cost to serve customers through its call center. In our setting, the product is a complex health insurance plan. The firm incurs substantial costs in serving the customers through its...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate various reliability measures like availability, reliability, mean time to failure and profit function. Design/methodology/approach The authors present a novel method for availability analysis of an engineering system incorporating waiting time to...

We conduct a field study with a US health insurance firm to examine how product customization affects firm’s cost to serve the customers through its call center. In our setting, the product is a complex health insurance plan. Firm incurs substantial cost in serving the customers through its...

Firms are investing millions to deploy web based self-services at their call centers primarily to reduce operating costs. The rationale is that the firm’s cost of interacting with customers through web based channel is an order of magnitude cheaper than the assisted channels like telephony....

Firms are investing millions to deploy web based self-services at their call centers primarily to reduce operating costs. The rationale is that the firm’s cost of interacting with customers through web based channel is an order of magnitude cheaper than the assisted channels like telephony....