A comparative study of speech in the call center: natural language call routing vs. touch-tone menus
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Human Factors and Voice Interactive Systems
Human Factors and Voice Interactive Systems
Simulation Modeling and Analysis
Simulation Modeling and Analysis
Increasing performances and personalization in the interaction with a call center system
Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces
Gatekeepers and Referrals in Services
Management Science
Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Commissioned Paper: Capacity Management, Investment, and Hedging: Review and Recent Developments
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
A Method for Staffing Large Call Centers Based on Stochastic Fluid Models
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Maximizing Queueing Network Utility Subject to Stability: Greedy Primal-Dual Algorithm
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
Technical support dialog systems: issues, problems, and solutions
NAACL-HLT-Dialog '07 Proceedings of the Workshop on Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies
Automatically training a problematic dialogue predictor for a spoken dialogue system
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Stable and utility-maximizing scheduling for stochastic processing networks
Allerton'09 Proceedings of the 47th annual Allerton conference on Communication, control, and computing
Control of systems with flexible multi-server pools: a shadow routing approach
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
The cμ/θ Rule for Many-Server Queues with Abandonment
Operations Research
Designing a call center with an IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
State Space Collapse in Many-Server Diffusion Limits of Parallel Server Systems
Mathematics of Operations Research
Shadow-Routing Based Control of Flexible Multiserver Pools in Overload
Operations Research
Data-stories about (im)patient customers in tele-queues
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
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We consider the robust design and control of call center systems with flexible interactive voice response (IVR) systems. In a typical call center equipped with an IVR system, customers are handled first by the IVR system, which is a computerized system that often enables customers to self-serve. Those customers whose service cannot be handled by the IVR system are sent to the second stage to be served by agents. To address the design of a call center with a flexible IVR system, we consider a call center whose IVR system can operate in two different service delivery modes that have statistically different outcomes. We formulate a stochastic program to determine the number of agents needed in the second stage as well as the proportion of customers that should be selected for each IVR service mode under different demand levels with the objective of minimizing the total staffing and abandonment costs. We also propose dynamic control policies to achieve the optimal proportions without the knowledge of the exact arrival rate. We show that the staffing levels found by the stochastic program combined with the proposed routing policies are asymptotically optimal in large systems. We present extensive numerical and simulation results to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.