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Benefits of cross-training in a skill-based routing contact center with priority queues and impatient customers

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  • Mahvareh Ahghari
  • Bariş Balcioĝlu

Abstract

Customer contact centers that provide different types of services to customers who place phone calls or send e-mail messages are studied. Customers calling are impatient; hence phone requests have a higher priority over e-mail messages. E-mails that are not responded to within a specified time limit can be prioritized. The goal of this paper is to assess the performance improvement via cross-training the agents. The performance of contact centers operated under different strategies are compared. An extensive simulation study is presented that shows that strategies permitting pre-emptive-resume policies provide the best performance for phone calls. The results also demonstrate that limited cross-training with two skills per agent results in considerable performance improvements. However, the unbalanced traffic intensities due to different mean service times for each class necessitate more cross-training at three skills per agent to have considerable improvement.[Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of IIE Transactions for the following free supplemental resource: Appendix of additional simulation results]

Suggested Citation

  • Mahvareh Ahghari & Bariş Balcioĝlu, 2009. "Benefits of cross-training in a skill-based routing contact center with priority queues and impatient customers," IISE Transactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(6), pages 524-536.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:uiiexx:v:41:y:2009:i:6:p:524-536
    DOI: 10.1080/07408170802432975
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    Cited by:

    1. Heng-Li Liu & Quan-Lin Li, 2023. "Matched Queues with Flexible and Impatient Customers," Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, Springer, vol. 25(1), pages 1-26, March.
    2. E. Morozov & B. Steyaert, 2013. "Stability analysis of a two-station cascade queueing network," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 202(1), pages 135-160, January.
    3. von Janda, Sergej & Polthier, Andreas & Kuester, Sabine, 2021. "Do they see the signs? Organizational response behavior to customer complaint messages," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 137(C), pages 116-127.
    4. Perlman, Yael & Elalouf, Amir & Yechiali, Uri, 2018. "Dynamic allocation of stochastically-arriving flexible resources to random streams of objects with application to kidney cross-transplantation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 265(1), pages 169-177.

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