Staffing Call Centers with Impatient Customers: Refinements to Many-Server Asymptotics

Authors:
Bo Zhang;Johan S. H. van Leeuwaarden;Bert Zwart
Affiliations:
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598;Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands;CWI, PNA2, Amsterdam, 1098 XG, The Netherlands
Venue:
Operations Research
Year:
2012

Citing 12
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Abstract

In call centers it is crucial to staff the right number of agents so that the targeted service levels are met. These staffing problems typically lead to constraint satisfaction problems that are hard to solve. During the last decade, a beautiful many-server asymptotic theory has been developed to solve such problems for large call centers, and optimal staffing rules are known to obey the square-root staffing principle. This paper presents refinements to many-server asymptotics and this staffing principle for a Markovian queueing model with impatient customers.