Telephone Call Centers - Performance, Design and Control of Time Varying Queues

电话呼叫中心 - 时变队列的性能、设计和控制

• 批准号: 0323668
• 负责人: William Massey
• 金额: $ 32.5万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-09-01 至 2007-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0323668&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Telephone; Call; Centers; Performance; Design

This research plan aims to investigate four specific areas: (1) the analysis of sojourn time distributions for call centers; (2) the modelling of contact centers; (3) server staffing for call centers with finite buffers and impatient customers; and (4) server staffing with non-Gaussian diffusion limits for some Markovian service network models. The time varying queueing models to be developed through their asymptotic analysis are guided by a desire to create an operational analysis for call centers. The results will address the fundamental problems of performance, design and control for these systems. One ultimate goal of the methods is to create new simplifying algorithms that practitioners can use. These new mathematical techniques will increase the understanding of time-dependent behavior and give tools for creating new types of call centers. New "rule of thumb" formulas and algorithms are needed for these challenges. Developing a deeper analysis for a broader class of queueing models becomes an important way to provide this insight. The majority of interactions between major businesses and their customers happens through the communication medium of call centers. This transfer of information helps businesses prosper by increasing the sales of their products and getting the necessary feedback to be more responsive to customer needs. Thus, the growth of call centers is driven by the growth of new businesses, the expansion of old ones, as well as the speed, capacity and cost of information technology. Nearly two-thirds of the cost for running call centers involves issues of staffing. Hence any methodology that optimizes the staffing of call centers has a significant impact on the efficient management of businesses. Traditionally queueing theory has been an important tool in the design and performance of service systems. However, these traditional queueing models do not begin to describe all the detailed attributes found in the real world complexity of call centers. Such systems can easily have time varying numbers agents, heterogeneous types of customers needs and multiple skill sets for agents. Each of these features points to a need to develop a richer class of tractable queueing models for the operational design, performance and control of call centers.

本研究计划旨在调查四个具体领域：（1）分析呼叫中心的逗留时间分布;（2）呼叫中心的建模;（3）有限缓冲区和不耐烦客户的呼叫中心服务器人员配置;（4）服务器人员配置与非高斯扩散限制的一些马尔可夫服务网络模型。 通过渐近分析开发的时变排队模型是由创建呼叫中心业务分析的愿望指导的。结果将解决这些系统的性能，设计和控制的基本问题。这些方法的一个最终目标是创建从业者可以使用的新的简化算法。 这些新的数学技术将增加对时间依赖行为的理解，并为创建新型呼叫中心提供工具。这些挑战需要新的“经验法则”公式和算法。为更广泛的嵌入模型类开发更深入的分析成为提供这种洞察力的重要方法。主要企业和客户之间的大多数互动都是通过呼叫中心的通信媒介进行的。这种信息的传递有助于企业通过增加产品的销售和获得必要的反馈来更好地响应客户的需求。因此，呼叫中心的增长是由新业务的增长、旧业务的扩张以及信息技术的速度、容量和成本驱动的。近三分之二的呼叫中心运营成本涉及人员配备问题。因此，任何优化呼叫中心人员配置的方法都对企业的有效管理产生重大影响。 传统上，服务系统的设计和性能的评估一直是一个重要的工具。然而，这些传统的呼叫中心模型并没有开始描述在呼叫中心的真实的世界复杂性中发现的所有详细属性。这样的系统可以很容易地具有随时间变化的代理数量，异构类型的客户需求和代理的多个技能集。这些特征中的每一个都指出需要开发更丰富的易于处理的呼叫中心模型，用于呼叫中心的运营设计、性能和控制。