Modelling and simulation of a telephone call center

Author

Pichitlamken, Juta ; Deslauriers, Alexandre ; L´Ecuyer, Pierre ; Avramidis, Athanassios N.

Author_Institution

Departement d´´Informatique et de Recherche Operationnelle, Montreal Univ., Que., Canada

Volume

2

fYear

2003

fDate

7-10 Dec. 2003

Firstpage

1805

Abstract

We consider a system with two types of traffic and two types of agents. Outbound calls are served only by blend agents, whereas inbound calls can be served by either inbound-only or blend agents. Our objective is to allocate a number of agents such that some service requirement is satisfied. We have taken two approaches in analyzing this staffing problem: we developed a simulation model of the call center, which allows us to do a what-if analysis, as well as continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) queueing models, which provide approximations of system performance measures. We describe the simulation model here.

Keywords

Markov processes; call centres; digital simulation; queueing theory; telephone traffic; continuous-time Markov chain queueing model; inbound agent; inbound call; inbound traffic; outbound agent; outbound call; outbound traffic; staffing problem; telephone call center simulation model; Analytical models; Computational modeling; Marketing and sales; Performance analysis; Productivity; Queueing analysis; Stochastic processes; System performance; Telephony; Traffic control;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Simulation Conference, 2003. Proceedings of the 2003 Winter

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8131-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WSC.2003.1261636

Filename

1261636