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Staff rostering in call centers providing employee transportation

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  • Örmeci, E. Lerzan
  • Salman, F. Sibel
  • Yücel, Eda

Abstract

We address the staff rostering problem in call centers with the goal of balancing operational cost, agent satisfaction and customer service objectives. In metropolitan cities such as Istanbul and Mumbai, call centers provide the transportation of their staff so that shuttle costs constitute a significant part of the operational costs. We develop a mixed integer programming model that incorporates the shuttle requirements at the beginning and end of the shifts into the agent-shift assignment decisions, while considering the skill sets of the agents, and other constraints due to workforce regulations and agent preferences. We analyze model solutions for a banking call center under various management priorities to understand the interactions among the conflicting objectives. We show that considering transportation costs as well as agent preferences in agent-shift assignments provides significant benefits in terms of both cost savings and employee satisfaction.

Suggested Citation

  • Örmeci, E. Lerzan & Salman, F. Sibel & Yücel, Eda, 2014. "Staff rostering in call centers providing employee transportation," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 41-53.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jomega:v:43:y:2014:i:c:p:41-53
    DOI: 10.1016/j.omega.2013.06.003
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    Cited by:

    1. Lai, David S.W. & Leung, Janny M.Y. & Dullaert, Wout & Marques, Inês, 2020. "A graph-based formulation for the shift rostering problem," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 284(1), pages 285-300.
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    3. Jiun-Yan Shiau & Ming-Kung Huang & Chu-Yi Huang, 2020. "A Hybrid Personnel Scheduling Model for Staff Rostering Problems," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(10), pages 1-20, October.
    4. Parisio, Alessandra & Neil Jones, Colin, 2015. "A two-stage stochastic programming approach to employee scheduling in retail outlets with uncertain demand," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 97-103.

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