Stochastic Models of Customer Contact centers

该补助金为创建和分析联系中心的概率模型提供资金。 联络中心是一个资源的集合，提供服务提供商与其客户之间的接口。 经典的联络中心是一个呼叫中心，包含通过电话与客户交谈的服务代表（代理）。在现代呼叫中心中，座席由复杂的信息和通信技术设备支持，例如交互式语音应答单元、自动呼叫分配器（ACD）、个人计算机和各种数据库。 随着电子商务的迅速发展，联系往往是通过电子邮件或互联网，而不是通过电话。 服务请求往往有许多类型，需要不同的服务技能，例如不同语言或技术信息的知识，而代理人回应这些请求的能力也各不相同。ACD能够通过基于技能的路由将呼叫路由到不同的座席，但仍有机会进行更好的路由和人员配置。如果某些工作可以推迟，多媒体提供了提高效率的机会。多媒体也会带来更复杂的接触体验。 客户可以在与代理商互动的时间段和在互联网上浏览的时间段之间交替。 因此，完整的联系体验可能发生在几个不相交的子时间间隔上。如果成功，这项研究的结果将导致基本原则，有效的控制算法和软件，这将使更好地设计和管理联络中心成为可能。 将开展工作，以更好地了解客户放弃和重试，建立随机过程限制，暴露非指数服务时间和时间放弃分布的影响，并找到联络中心资源池的条件，其中大型单一技能中心的效率在多技能中心以最小的灵活性实现。

This grant provides funding for creating and analyzing probability models of contact centers. A contact center is a collection of resources providing an interface between a service provider and its customers. The classical contact center is a call center, containing service representatives (agents) who talk to customers over the telephone. In modern call centers, agents are supported by elaborate information-and communication-technology equipment, such as an interactive voice response unit, an automatic call distributor (ACD), a personal computer and assorted databases. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, contact is often made via e-mail or the Internet instead of by telephone. There often are many types of service requests, requiring different service skills, such as knowledge of different languages or technical information, and the agents differ in their ability to respond to these requests. The ACD is able to route calls to different agents through skill-based routing, but there remains an opportunity to do better routing and staffing. Multimedia present opportunities for improved efficiency if some of the work can be postponed. Multimedia also lead to more complicated contact experiences. Customers may alternate between periods of interaction with agents and periods of browsing on the Internet. Thus, the full contact experience may take place over several disjoint subintervals of time.If successful, the results of this research will lead to fundamental principles, effective control algorithms and software that will make it possible to better design and manage contact centers. Work will be done to better understand customer abandonment and retrials, to establish stochastic-process limits that expose the impact of non-exponential service-time and time-to-abandon distributions, and to find conditions for resource pooling in contact centers, where the efficiency of a large single-skill center is achieved in a multi-skilled center with minimal flexibility.