Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Modeling Daily Arrivals to a Telephone Call Center
Management Science
A Method for Staffing Large Call Centers Based on Stochastic Fluid Models
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Performance measures for service systems with a random arrival rate
WSC '05 Proceedings of the 37th conference on Winter simulation
Evaluating arrival rate uncertainty in call centers
Proceedings of the 38th conference on Winter simulation
Call-Routing Schemes for Call-Center Outsourcing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Service-Level Agreements in Call Centers: Perils and Prescriptions
Management Science
Interday Forecasting and Intraday Updating of Call Center Arrivals
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dynamic staffing in a telephone call center aiming to immediately answer all calls
Operations Research Letters
Service-Level Variability of Inbound Call Centers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
On the modeling and forecasting of call center arrivals
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
Does the Erlang C model fit in real call centers?
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
Data-stories about (im)patient customers in tele-queues
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
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We investigate the presence and impact of forecast errors in the arrival rate of customers to a service system. Analysis of a large dataset shows that forecast errors can be large relative to the fluctuations naturally expected in a Poisson process. We show that ignoring forecast errors typically leads to overestimates of performance and that forecast errors of the magnitude seen in our dataset can have a practically significant impact on predictions of long-run performance. We also define short-run performance as the random percentage of calls received in a particular period that are answered in a timely fashion. We prove a central limit theorem that yields a normal-mixture approximation for its distribution for Markovian queues and we sketch an argument that shows that a normal-mixture approximation should be valid in great generality. Our results provide motivation for studying staffing strategies that are more flexible than the fixed-level staffing rules traditionally studied in the literature.