TECHNICAL NOTE---A Note on Profit Maximization and Monotonicity for Inbound Call Centers

Authors:
Ger Koole;Auke Pot
Affiliations:
Department of Mathematics, VU University Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;CCmath, 1181 BH Amstelveen, The Netherlands
Venue:
Operations Research
Year:
2011

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Abstract

We consider an inbound call center with a fixed reward per call and communication and agent costs. By controlling the number of lines and the number of agents, we can maximize the profit. Abandonments are included in our performance model. Monotonicity results for the maximization problem are obtained, which lead to an efficient optimization procedure. We give a counterexample to the concavity in the number of agents, which is equivalent to saying that the law of diminishing returns does not hold. Numerical results are given.