Scalable Analysis for Customer Contact Centers

客户联络中心的可扩展分析

• 批准号: 0727400
• 负责人: Jiangang Dai
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-07-01 至 2011-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0727400&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Scalable; Analysis; Customer; Contact; Centers

This grant provides funding for the development of tools that help analyze the performance of customer contact centers. Customer Contact Centers are organizations or entities providing service to customers via chat-box, e-mail, phone, or other communication channels. Such centers play an increasingly dominant role in society. Customer contact centers can be of any size and appear in a variety of places. Most US companies employ moderate- or small-size call centers. For multiserver systems that model customer contact centers, the PIs propose to develop universal, scalable approximations for various performance measures such as the fraction of customers that encounter a delay. These approximations will be computationally efficient for both small and large systems, and for systems that may not necessarily be critically loaded (think of call centers for emergencies). The PIs will pay special attention to realistic model features like general service time distribution and customer abandonment, leading to the challenge of developing algorithms for high dimensional diffusion processes. The proposed research will involve a wide range of techniques like numerical solution of partial differential equations, diffusion processes, extreme value theory, large deviations and analytic techniques; many of which are new in this area.If successful, this research will result in single universal method for call center staffing that is applicable in a variety of settings. The algorithm will be implemented. The proposed software implementation provides a practical tool to allow one to study the impact of service time variability and patience time distribution on system performance. The PIs intend to make the software available to academic researchers, practitioners from industry, and university students.

这笔拨款为开发有助于分析客户联络中心绩效的工具提供资金。客户联络中心是通过聊天、电子邮件、电话或其他通信渠道向客户提供服务的组织或实体。这些中心在社会中发挥着越来越重要的作用。客户联络中心可以是任何规模的，出现在各种各样的地方。大多数美国公司都有中型或小型的呼叫中心。对于为客户联络中心建模的多服务器系统，pi建议为各种性能度量（如遇到延迟的客户比例）开发通用的、可扩展的近似。这些近似对于小型和大型系统以及可能不一定是临界负载的系统（想想紧急情况的呼叫中心）来说都是计算效率很高的。pi将特别关注实际模型特征，如一般服务时间分布和客户放弃，这将导致开发高维扩散过程算法的挑战。拟开展的研究将涉及广泛的技术，如偏微分方程的数值解、扩散过程、极值理论、大偏差和分析技术；其中很多都是这个领域的新产品。如果成功，这项研究将产生适用于各种设置的呼叫中心人员配置的单一通用方法。算法将被实现。提出的软件实现提供了一个实用的工具，允许人们研究服务时间可变性和耐心时间分布对系统性能的影响。pi打算将该软件提供给学术研究人员、行业从业者和大学生。