Workforce Planning for Single Call Center with Service-Level Agreement

Abstract

Workforce planning could be a critical process in call center operations. Due to arrival, calls are both time varying and uncertain, assigning the agents to the call center operations which responses to all calls might be not an easy task. This chapter demonstrates the workforce planning of a call center that services the number of calls required and satisfies the expected service level. The historical data are provided by a call center in a communication service company in Thailand. The data are forecasted by decomposition technique for the planning period. The queuing theory and the linear programming are used as the methodological tools. The call center operation is simplified to the M/M/n model and the Erlang C formulation is applied to solve for the number of agents required. In order to define shifts and assign agents to meet the needs, the model of Aykin is adapted to minimize the total of agents assigned. The results provide the number of agents to be assigned in the daily operations. The monthly workforce planning model is then formulated with the number of agents as decision variable and the objective is to minimize the total number of agent assignment. This problem can be solved by linear programming and the method could assist a manager to formulate monthly workforce plan that can satisfy the expected service level.