Predicting queueing delays for multiclass call centers

Authors:
Oualid Jouini;Yves Dallery
Affiliations:
Ecole Centrale Paris, Chatenay-Malabry Cedex, France;Ecole Centrale Paris, Chatenay-Malabry Cedex, France
Venue:
valuetools '06 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Performance evaluation methodolgies and tools
Year:
2006

Citing 5
Cited 1

Improving Service by Informing Customers About Anticipated Delays

Management Science
Predicting Queueing Delays

Management Science
Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
THE DEVIATION MATRIX OF A CONTINUOUS-TIME MARKOV CHAIN

Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences
On Customer Contact Centers with a Call-Back Option: Customer Decisions, Routing Rules, and System Design

Operations Research

Predicting departure times in multi-stage queueing systems

Computers and Operations Research

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper deals with real-time operation management in call centers. We investigate the prediction of the waiting time for each customer upon arrival. We model our call center by a multiclass multiserver service system. The system consists of a pool of full-flexible agents, and two classes of impatient customers. First, we propose estimators for the state-dependent waiting time distributions for new arrivals by incorporating the change that may occur on their waiting experience. Next, we investigate the way to inform customers about their anticipated delays. We discuss different ways to communicate this information. In particular, we give attention to analyzing the announcement of the waiting time by steps.