Full Description
The material presented in this book is a result of my work in the field of call center management during the period 1999-2002. The focus is on the perfor mance analysis and optimization of inbound call centers. Since call arrivals and call-handling times are often random in inbound call centers, this thesis concentrates on the performance analysis and optimization using queueing models. This book describes mathematical methods and algorithms to relate the number of agents and telephone trunks of a given call center configuration to technical as well as economic performance measures. This book has been accepted as a PhD thesis in Business Administration at the Technical University of Clausthal, Germany. I am indebted to many people for their support during the process of writing this thesis. First of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Dr. Stefan Helber, for motivating my research to call center related problems. He gently pushed me in fruitful directions and encouraged me to strike a balance between mathematical results and economic implications. Many other helpful suggestions came from him, and his constructive comments on draft versions of this book are invaluable. I am thankful to him and to Prof. Dr. Rolf Schwinn for refereeing this thesis.
Contents
1 Introduction.- 2 Characterization of Inbound Call Centers.- 2.1 What is an Inbound Call Center?.- 2.2 Performance Measures and Objective Functions.- 2.3 Operational Personnel Planning in Inbound Call Centers.- 3 Classification of Queueing Models of Inbound Call Centers.- 3.1 Characteristics of Queueing Models of Call Centers.- 3.2 Classification by Customers and Agents.- 3.3 Routing Decisions in Call Centers.- 3.4 Limitation of the Waiting Room.- 3.5 Review of the Literature.- 4 Queueing Models of Call Centers with Homogeneous Customers and Homogeneous Agents.- 4.1 Common Features.- 4.2 The M /M/c and M /M/c/K Queueing Models with Patient Customers.- 4.4 Management Implications of the Numerical Results.- 5 Queueing Model of a Call Center with two Classes of Customers and Skill-Based Routing.- 5.1 Description of the Queueing System.- 5.2 Description of the State Space.- 5.3 Steady-State Equations.- 5.4 Determination of Performance Measures.- 5.5 Numerical Results.- 5.6 Management Implications of the Numerical Results.- 6 Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Research.- A Algorithms for Call Center Models with Homogeneous Customers and Agents.- B Appendix for the Queueing Model of a Call Center with two Classes of Customers and Skill-Based Routing.- Glossary of Notation.- List of Figures.- List of Tables.- References.
