Dynamic staffing in a telephone call center aiming to immediately answer all calls

Authors:
Ward Whitt
Affiliations:
Room A117, AT&T Labs, Shannon Laboratory, 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA
Venue:
Operations Research Letters
Year:
1999

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Abstract

This paper proposes practical modeling and analysis methods to facilitate dynamic staffing in a telephone call center with the objective of immediately answering all calls. Because of this goal, it is natural to use infinite-server queueing models. These models are very useful because they are so tractable. A key to the dynamic staffing is exploiting detailed knowledge of system state in order to obtain good estimates of the mean and variance of the demand in the near future. The near-term staffing needs, e.g., for the next minute or the next 20 min., can often be predicted by exploiting information about recent demand and current calls in progress, as well as historical data. The remaining holding times of calls in progress can be predicted by classifying and keeping track of call types, by measuring holding-time distributions and by taking account of the elapsed holding times of calls in progress. The number of new calls in service can be predicted by exploiting information about both historical and recent demand.