Managing customer contact centers with delay announcements and automated service

This article presents a study of the queueing system resulting from the service of customers in a generic customer contact center that has both automated service and traditional human agent service. Contact center managers would prefer customers use the provided automated service to reduce average customer queuing time as well as staffing costs of required human agent service agents. However, forcing customers to use automated service may lead to customer dissatisfaction. In this study, we propose to increase the use of automated service by using delay announcements as a tool to help guide customers to use automated service who would otherwise have chosen agent service. We present a stochastic optimization formulation to determine the optimal staffing level and delay announcement policy, with an objective to minimize staffing cost, customer balking, and reneging penalty. Closed-form solutions are derived using a fluid approximation, and the asymptotic optimality of the solutions is established. The obtained optimal policies are demonstrated by numerical experiments. A key managerial insight is that with automated service, the optimal delay announcement policy no longer satisfies the well-known information-consistent balking property for a customer contact center using delay announcement without automated service. Instead, there is a new equilibrium delay policy that uses an “extreme positive bias” to reduce the length of the queue for human agent service to zero.