The focus of this book is on the management of inbound call centers. Based on technical performance measures this book develops economic performance measures for different classes of telephone service numbers. Both the numbers of agents and the number of offered phones lines are decision variables in the operational personnel planning process. Since call arrivals as well as call-handling times are random in inbound call centers, this book concentrates on performance analysis and optimization using queueing models. These models may differ with respect to several features, for example, the number of customer classes, the number of differently trained agent groups, the limitation of the waiting room, or the customer's impatience. This book describes mathematical methods and algorithms to relate these decision variables to technical as well as economic performance measures.

Keywords: Call Center Management, Performance Analysis, Queueing Models, Service Management, Optimization

Contents

• Introduction
• Characterization of Inbound Call Centers
• Classification of Queueing Models of Inbound Call Centers
• Queueing Models of Call Centers with Homogeneous Customers and Homogeneous Agents Queueing
• Model of a Call Center with two Classes of Customers and Skill-based Routing Conclusions and Suggestions for Further Research
• Appendices