Scheduling policies to minimize abandonment costs in infomercial call centers

Abstract

Infomercial call centers answer calls in an order that reduces the number of abandoned calls to minimize lost revenue. We study a multi-class queuing system with a single server and customer abandonment, motivated by the case of infomercial call centers. We fully characterize the structure of the server’s optimal scheduling policy that minimizes the long-run average customer abandonment cost. We show that the optimal service policy is a static priority policy. We derive sufficient conditions under which the so-called b μ –rule is optimal. Under the b μ –rule, it is optimal to give priority to the customer type that has a higher service rate ( μ ) and higher abandonment cost (b), i.e., higher index b μ . We numerically test the robustness of our proposed policy in more general settings, including multi-server infomercial call centers.