Abstract
Abstract This paper studies and applies queueing systems to Call Centers regarding the possibility of customer abandonment from the system before being served due to their impatience in waiting for a service. Call Centers are service organizations that predominantly serve customers via phone calls. One of the main concerns in managing them is to provide quality service at a minimum cost. Noticing the quality of services offered is expressed by customers, for example by abandonment from the queue. This paper shows that the M/M/c+G analytical queueing models with abandonment, with patience time represented by generic distributions (particularly mixed distributions), are more effective than the M/M/c+M analytical queueing models with abandonment, with Exponential patience, commonly used to evaluate congestion problems in Call Centers and support sizing and operational decisions in these systems. We conducted a study using data extracted from a Bank Call Center located in Israel and the parameters and some performance measures are determined based on this data. These sampling measures are compared with the same measures achieved by the M/M/c+M and M/M/c+G analytical queueing models considered in this research, which use parameters obtained empirically and the mixed and non-mixed distributions based on Exponential and Lognormal to represent user patience. An experimental discrete simulation model was also used to explore an alternative scenario, showing the potential of using the approaches based on analytical models with abandonment for Call Center analysis.
Highlights
Call Centers, called Contact Centers, are one of the main communication channels between companies and their customers in various sectors
Call Centers are service organizations that predominantly attend to customers via telephone calls and are considered a particular type of Contact Center that serve their customers by telephone, fax, email, chat, mobile devices and other communication channels
This paper presented and applied analytical queueing models with abandonment, with generic or Exponential distributions, as an effective analysis approach to represent and analyze congestion problems in Call Centers
Summary
Call Centers, called Contact Centers, are one of the main communication channels between companies and their customers in various sectors. As the purpose of this article is to analyze Call Centers from a quantitative point of view, we decided to adopt user abandonment measured by the probability of abandonment as metrics for the analyses to be carried out, among those considered important by managers. It is an indicator in contracts between Call Centers and companies that occurs when a user hangs up before being served by an agent. The values of these metrics extracted from the observed data from a Call Center are compared with those obtained from mathematical and simulation models
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