A Comparative Analysis of Waiting Time Routing Rule for Queue Reduction in Call Center (original) (raw)
Related papers
Analysis of Call Routing Rules for Improving Call Centre Operations in Nigeria
International Journal of Computer Applications
Routing rules plays a very important role in the services offered by call centres in a competitive environment. For example, a call centre whose priority is to reduce overall mean time to service completion, one might think it best to route calls to agents who can handle it the fastest sometimes even holding a call in queue to wait for that agent to free up rather than routing it to a slower agent. However, this rule does not account for the increase in congestion resulting from repeated phone calls associated with unresolved issues. On the other hand, for a call centre that is primarily focused on call resolution, it seems optimal to route each call type to the agent who can handle it the best, thus holding that call in queue even if other agents are idle and/or become available earlier. However, in an environment where there is significant variability across different agents' resolution probabilities. Routing rules that are based solely on these rates are likely to lead to long queues. This work attempts to determine whether average handling time and call resolution rate are true
Ditila Ekmekçiu: Optimizing a call center performance using queueing models– an Albanian case
The world of call centers is an important reality nowadays and helping the decision making of the operations management is fundamental for this industry. A call center generally represents the first contact of a customer with a specific company. As a result, the quality of the service offered is of fundamental importance. The objective of this paper is to see how to apply the queueing models in order to optimize the call centers’ performance. A crucial factor of the call centers’ optimization is determining the proper number of agents, during a working day, considering the chosen performance measure. The experiment is done in one of the Albanian outsourcing call centers. The literature related to the application of such models at call centers is reviewed. A suitable number of agents was determined for different peak periods of the working day, considering the most important performance measures. The obtained results prove how useful and applicable are the stochastic queueing models as a tool for a call centers’ performance, in terms of the expected waiting time, number of customers waiting for service and of call centers service levels optimization. Practically, all the data needed for this mathematical/analytical approach is provided. This paper has the purpose to illustrate how such data can be efficiently used to advantage the operations management. Keywords: Call center, Service Levels, Optimization, Queueing Models
Pesquisa Operacional, 2022
This study analyzes performance measures in a Call Center with impatient customers, who may leave the system before being served. The abandonment of the waiting line is a measure of the subjective perception of the quality of the services offered, being one of the main concerns of the managers of Call Center systems. Based on data extracted from the case study of a Brazilian company, it is shown that the analytical queuing models M/G c /1+G and M/G/c+G, with generic distributions to represent service times and generic distributions (particularly mixed distributions) to represent patience times, can be effective to evaluate the congestion problem of this Call Center. The sampling performance measures of this case are compared with the measurements obtained through the M/G c /1+G and M/G/c+G models, using nonmixed and mixed distributions based on Exponential, Fatigue Life and Normal distributions to represent customers' patience. We are not aware of other studies in the literature in this line of research. The results indicate that, in general, the use of analytical queuing models with abandonment, exploring more elaborate distributions to model service times and mixed distributions for patience times, are more accurate in evaluating this Call Center than other queuing models with abandonment, such as the M/M/c+M, M/M/c+G and M/G/c+M.
Waiting in Vain: Managing Time and Customer Satisfaction at Call Centers
Psychology, 2012
The aim was to investigate customers' satisfaction with telephone waiting time using data collected among 3013 customers who were asked for their waiting time satisfaction, information satisfaction, and service satisfaction. The actual queue time was also measured and played a significant but small role on time satisfaction. In order to keep customers satisfied with waiting time, a successful model is an informative satisfactory answer and top of the line service, even when queue times are large. Nevertheless, the model was less useful to predict non satisfied customers. This specific information needs to be integrated when organizations assess customers' time satisfaction.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate what factors influence the gap between caller's perception of how long they think they waited and how long they actually waited on hold and to determine what call managers can do to reduce this gap called estimation error. Design/methodology/approach – A field experiment was conducted with a corporation's call center. Findings – The findings were: the higher the estimation error of callers, the less satisfied they are; music increases estimation error, unless callers can choose the music; waiting information reduces estimation error; callers with urgent issues have more estimation error and they overestimate more; and females have higher estimation error and they overestimate more than males. Research limitations/implications – Limitations are one call center in one context. Implications are identification of antecedents of overestimation. Practical implications – The paper provides guidelines for call center managers for reducing estimation error and increasing caller satisfaction. It discusses the need for understanding callers and measuring items that are important to them. Originality/value – The study investigates an under researched variable called estimation error. Study also provides information about some of the causes for why consumers overestimate or underestimate their waiting time. Study provides guidelines from an actual call center and discusses variables that managers can easily use to decrease estimation error and overestimation.
Performance indicators for call centers with impatient customers
IIE Transactions, 2013
An important feature of call center modeling is the presence of impatient customers. In this paper, we consider single-skill call centers including customer abandonments. We study a number of different service level definitions, including all those used in practice, and show how to explicitly compute their performance measures. Based on data from different call centers, new models are defined that extend the common Erlang A model. We show that the new models fit reality very well.
Analysis of Queuing to Customers Management in Banking: A Case Study
Proceedings of the 11th Symposium on Applied Science, Business & Industrial Research , 2019
Banking services have emerged as a foremost service under contemporary circumstances. The vigorous competition among the banking and financial services sector provides a platform for continuous improvements in their services. With the increased usage of banking services, identifying the means of improving customer satisfaction is essential. Psychology of waiting lines has proven to decrease the level of satisfaction through the increased waiting times. The study was undertaken to model and reduce the waiting times at the two counters of a commercial bank. Primary data on arrival and the service times for each customer arrival at the counters were taken. The study was conducted during the working hours for two consecutive weeks. Data collected from 150 customers were modelled using the student version of Rockwell ARENA 14.5 platform. The system was then modelled as multiserver quieuing system with unlimited waiting room capacity.It was run for 100 a replication length of customers. It was observed respective waitng times in the queues of current system to be 11 and 1.52 minutes for counter 1 and counter 2 respectively. Further the corresponding number of customers waiting in the queues were five and one. Therefore, the bank needed improvements for efficient service delivery. The system was simulated on two basic alternatives, namely; increment fo the service rate in a single queue at a time and the increment of the service rate in both the queues at once. The results obtained depicted the waiting times of the queues to be 5.25, 0.16 minutes and 0.52 ,0.12 minutes, respectively for the two alternatives. Thus the bank can eliminate excessive waiting through the increment of the service rate by twofold in one queue or in both the queues at once. The obtained results moreover emphasized the importance of the employees in the service industry and their continuous improvements in both skills and knowledge.
A contact centre is a centralized office of a company that mainly handles incoming telephone calls from customers via telephone. The contact centre basically functions as a primary contact point between customers and their service providers. Contact centres are highly technology driven. However, surprisingly, most of the costs incurred in a contact centre are due to human resources. Customer service agents who handle the calls form most of the human resource component in a contact centre. An important goal of the contact centre is to provide a good level of customer service. A good customer service level will ensure customer satisfaction so that customers will return. The consequence of making customers wait too long may be lost profit from lost business opportunities. In this context, queuing models are important to determine the appropriate number of customer service agents that strike a balance between the two conflicting objectives of cost reduction and provision of good service. In this study, we build queuing models to evaluate the performance of a contact centre that belongs to one of Malaysia's leading telecommunication service provider and plan its staffing levels. The telephone calls coming in to the contact centre are treated as the customers in the queuing system, and the customer service agents are the servers. The telephone calls that arrived on a Monday during the peak period fitted the assumptions underlying the Erlang C or the M/M/s model in terms of arrival pattern and service time. The model was extended to M/M/s + M or the Erlang A model by including the patience variable. Both the models were then used to analyze and compare the contact centres' operating characteristics and to decide various numbers of staffs required to achieve different management objectives.
Measure of Performance of Queuing Models and Behavior of Customers in Real Life Applications
International Journal of Applied Physics and Mathematics, 2013
The objective of the paper is to determine customer behavior in queues in four different situations in India. The study is limited to Toll Booth-Delhi Gurgaon Highway, Health care facility for Public sector bank's staff and family, Executive check up in Health care organization and Tellers in a Bank. A detailed study of the queues at the Toll Booth on the Delhi Gurgaon expressway was done as the expressway is highly traversed and is a bottlenecked stretch. In spite of the multiple provisions to ease the traffic on this expressway, chronic delays led to a ruling by the court which made the expressway a freeway for two weeks in September 2012. The second case studied is of the work mechanism of a clinic set up for the public sector bank's staff and family in India. The doctor visits the clinic during specified hours. It was observed that one doctor caters to a large number of patients giving rise to long queues. The third case is of the hospital which has an Out Patient Department (OPD) that provides service for executive health checkup. Our study is limited to the executive health checkups, where a patient first registers and then is guided to different departments for the checkups. Lastly the study was conducted for a bank where the major business of this particular bank is retail banking for which the customer is diverted towards the tellers. Due to cost considerations and space constraint the number of tellers in a bank is limited. Inspite of the use of modern technology to streamline the queues, it is observed that during peak business hours the length of the queue increases resulting in increased waiting time for the customers. This paper attempts to do a comparative study for four different models to understand the behavior of customers waiting in queues in India.