Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dimensioning Large Call Centers
Operations Research
A Method for Staffing Large Call Centers Based on Stochastic Fluid Models
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Simulation Modeling and Analysis (McGraw-Hill Series in Industrial Engineering and Management)
Simulation Modeling and Analysis (McGraw-Hill Series in Industrial Engineering and Management)
Evaluating arrival rate uncertainty in call centers
Proceedings of the 38th conference on Winter simulation
Call-Routing Schemes for Call-Center Outsourcing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
A Staffing Algorithm for Call Centers with Skill-Based Routing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Forecast errors in service systems
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences
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We consider the Erlang C model, a queuing model commonly used to analyze call center performance. Erlang C is a simple model that ignores caller abandonment and is the model most commonly used by practitioners and researchers. We compare the theoretical performance predictions of the Erlang C model to a call center simulation model where many of the Erlang C assumptions are relaxed. Our findings indicate that the Erlang C model is subject to significant error in predicting system performance, but that these errors are heavily biased and most likely to be pessimistic, i.e. the system tends to perform better than predicted. It may be the case that the model's tendency to provide pessimistic (i.e. conservative) estimates helps explain its continued popularity. Prediction error is strongly correlated with the abandonment rate so the model works best in call centers with large numbers of agents and relatively low utilization rates.