Randomized algorithms
Designing a Call Center with Impatient Customers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dimensioning Large Call Centers
Operations Research
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
Fluid Models for Multiserver Queues with Abandonments
Operations Research
Forecast errors in service systems
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences
Service-Level Differentiation in Call Centers with Fully Flexible Servers
Management Science
On a Data-Driven Method for Staffing Large Call Centers
Operations Research
Dynamic staffing in a telephone call center aiming to immediately answer all calls
Operations Research Letters
Shadow-Routing Based Control of Flexible Multiserver Pools in Overload
Operations Research
Robust Design and Control of Call Centers with Flexible Interactive Voice Response Systems
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Data-stories about (im)patient customers in tele-queues
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
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We study a capacity sizing problem in a service system that is modeled as a single-class queue with multiple servers and where customers may renege while waiting for service. A salient feature of the model is that the mean arrival rate of work is random (in practice this is a typical consequence of forecasting errors). The paper elucidates the impact of uncertainty on the nature of capacity prescriptions, and relates these to well established rules-of-thumb such as the square-root safety staffing principle. We establish a simple and intuitive relationship between the incoming load (measured in Erlangs) and the extent of uncertainty in arrival rates (measured via the coefficient of variation) that characterizes the extent to which uncertainty dominates stochastic variability or vice versa. In the former case it is shown that traditional square-root safety staffing logic is no longer valid, yet simple capacity prescriptions derived via a suitable newsvendor problem are surprisingly accurate.