Balanced allocations (extended abstract)
STOC '94 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Principles on the benefits of manufacturing process flexibility
Management Science
On Pooling in Queueing Networks
Management Science
Designing a Call Center with Impatient Customers
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
The power of two choices in randomized load balancing
The power of two choices in randomized load balancing
Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
A Staffing Algorithm for Call Centers with Skill-Based Routing
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Comparing skill-based routing call center simulations using C programming and arena models
WSC '05 Proceedings of the 37th 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
Partial cross training in call centers with uncertain arrivals and global service level agreements
Proceedings of the 39th conference on Winter simulation: 40 years! The best is yet to come
Managing trade-offs in call center agent scheduling: methodology and case study
Proceedings of the 2007 Summer Computer Simulation Conference
Speeding up call center simulation and optimization by Markov chain uniformization
Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation
Dynamic routing policies for multiskill call centers
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences
Dynamic routing of customers with general delay costs in a multiserver queuing system
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences
On a Data-Driven Method for Staffing Large Call Centers
Operations Research
Service Interruptions in Large-Scale Service Systems
Management Science
Bringing science to the art of workforce management in service industries
CASE'09 Proceedings of the fifth annual IEEE international conference on Automation science and engineering
Priority-based routing with strict deadlines and server flexibility under uncertainty
Winter Simulation Conference
Intelligent call routing: optimizing contact center throughput
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining
Scheduling service tickets in shared delivery
ICSOC'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Service-Oriented Computing
Does the Erlang C model fit in real call centers?
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
Queueing system topologies with limited flexibility
Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS/international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Analysis of operational data to improve performance in service delivery systems
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network and Service Management
Queues with skill based parallel servers and a FCFS infinite matching model
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
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Call centers usually handle several types of calls, but it is usually not possible or cost effective to have every agent be able to handle every type of call. Thus, the agents tend to have different skills, in different combinations. In such an environment, it is challenging to route calls effectively and determine the staff requirements. This paper addresses both of these routing and staffing problems by exploiting limited cross-training. Consistent with the literature on flexible manufacturing, we find that minimal flexibility can provide great benefits: Simulation experiments show that when (1) the service-time distribution does not depend on the call type or the agent and (2) each agent has only two skills, in appropriate combinations, the performance is almost as good as when each agent has all skills. We apply this flexibility property to develop an algorithm for both routing and staffing, aiming to minimize the total staff subject to per-class performance constraints. With appropriate flexibility, it suffices to use a suboptimal routing algorithm. Simulation experiments show that the overall procedure can be remarkably effective: The required staff with limited cross-training can be nearly the same as if all agents had all skills. Hence, the overall algorithm is nearly optimal for that scenario.