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Call Center Delay Announcement Using a Newsvendor‐Like Performance Criterion
Author(s) -
Jouini Oualid,
Akşin O. Zeynep,
Karaesmen Fikri,
Aguir M. Salah,
Dallery Yves
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/poms.12259
Subject(s) - newsvendor model , erlang (programming language) , estimator , computer science , queue , range (aeronautics) , real time computing , statistics , computer network , mathematics , business , functional programming , supply chain , materials science , theoretical computer science , marketing , composite material
The problem of estimating delays experienced by customers with different priorities, and the determination of the appropriate delay announcement to these customers, in a multi‐class call center with time varying parameters, abandonments, and retrials is considered. The system is approximately modeled as an M ( t )/ M / s ( t ) queue with priorities, thus ignoring some of the real features like abandonments and retrials. Two delay estimators are proposed and tested in a series of simulation experiments. Making use of actual state‐dependent waiting time data from this call center, the delay announcements from the estimated delay distributions that minimize a newsvendor‐like cost function are considered. The performance of these announcements is also compared to announcing the mean delay. We find that an Erlang distribution‐based estimator performs well for a range of different under‐announcement penalty to over‐announcement penalty ratios.