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Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers

Author

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  • Vijay Mehrotra

    (School of Management, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94117)

  • Kevin Ross

    (Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California 95064)

  • Geoff Ryder

    (SAP Labs, Palo Alto, California 94304)

  • Yong-Pin Zhou

    (Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195)

Abstract

In many call centers, agents are trained to handle all arriving calls but exhibit very different performance for the same call type, where we define performance by both the average call handling time and the call resolution probability. In this paper, we explore strategies for determining which calls should be handled by which agents, where these assignments are dynamically determined based on the specific attributes of the agents and/or the current state of the system. We test several routing strategies using data obtained from a medium-sized financial service firm's customer service call centers and present empirical performance results. These results allow us to characterize overall performance in terms of customer waiting time and overall resolution rate, identifying an efficient frontier of routing rules for this contact center.

Suggested Citation

  • Vijay Mehrotra & Kevin Ross & Geoff Ryder & Yong-Pin Zhou, 2012. "Routing to Manage Resolution and Waiting Time in Call Centers with Heterogeneous Servers," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 14(1), pages 66-81, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormsom:v:14:y:2012:i:1:p:66-81
    DOI: 10.1287/msom.1110.0349
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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