Analyzing skill-based routing call centers using discrete-event simulation and design experiment

Call center customer service representatives (CSRs) or agents tend to have different skills. Some CSRs can handle one type of call, while other CSRs can handle other types of calls. Advances in automatic call distributors (ACDs) have made it possible to have skill-based routing (SBR) which is the protocol for online routing of incoming calls to the appropriate CSRs. At present, very little is known about SBR. We develop a discrete-event simulation model to analyze the performance of a M_n/M_n/C/K SBR environment in which incoming calls are handled in priority order and in a nonpreemptive manner. We use the design of experiment framework to conduct our analysis. We show empirically that the scenario in which agents have 2 skills is almost as efficient as the scenario where agents have all skills (resource pooling). Also, we discover that no interaction exists between call rate factors when resource pooling exists.