Call center performance evaluation

In this paper, the effect of using a combination of multi-skill and specialized agents on the performance of a call center is studied. An OPNET simulator for the call center has been designed, implemented, and verified. The designed simulator has the flexibility that facilitates comparison of different scenarios. The scenarios are mainly oriented toward finding the performance enhancement that could be gained by using a combination of multi-skill and specialized agents. As the usual case in such problems, there must be an optimum combination that results in the best performance for a lower cost. The designed simulator provides a very powerful and scalable tool that could be used to find such an optimum, and could be easily modified to support larger call centers. Some selected scenarios have been tested and the results introduced and analyzed. The result of our research concludes that the economies of scale could be obtained by cross training only a minor fraction of agents