Adaptive threshold policies for multi-channel call centers

Benjamin Legros (1) , Oualid Jouini (1) , Ger Koole (2)

1 LGI - Laboratoire Génie Industriel - EA 2606
2 VU - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam [Amsterdam]

In the context of multi-channel call centers with inbound calls and emails, we consider a threshold policy on the reservation of agents for the inbound calls. We study a general non-stationary model where calls arrive according to a non-homogeneous Poisson process. The optimization problem consists of maximizing the throughput of emails under a constraint on the waiting time of inbound calls. We propose an efficient adaptive threshold policy that is easy to implement in the Automatic Call Distributor (ACD). This scheduling policy is evaluated through a comparison with the optimal performance measures found in the case of a constant arrival rate, and also a comparison with other intuitive adaptive threshold policies in the general non-stationary case.

Mots clés: threshold policies, Queueing systems, service operations, multi-channel call centers

Domaines: Informatique [cs]; Mathématiques [math]

Benjamin Legros, Oualid Jouini, Ger Koole. Adaptive threshold policies for multi-channel call centers. IIE Transactions, 2015, 47, pp.414-430. ⟨10.1080/0740817X.2014.928965⟩. ⟨hal-01198404⟩