We study a simple method for staffing in multiskill call centers. The method has short computation times and determines nearly optimal staffing levels. It is in both views competitive to other methods from the literature. Because of the fast and accurate performance of the method, many different...

This paper introduces a new method for shift scheduling in multiskill call centers. The method consists of two steps. First, staffing levels are determined, and next, in the second step, the outcomes are used as input for the scheduling problem. The scheduling problem relies on a linear...

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...