Developing staff schedules for a bilingual telecommunication call center with flexible workers

Abstract

Call centers constitute growing and significant portions in national economies. This is due to the fact that the customer satisfaction has become the sole performance measure that drives the businesses today, and the call centers are the main means for companies to communicate with their customers. Additionally many public services, such as emergency and security services, cannot operate without their call centers. There is a vast body of literature on different aspects of the call center related problems. In this study, we describe a comprehensive methodology for developing staff schedules in a bilingual (Arabic and English) call center of a local telecommunication company. Our approach involves two main parts. First we obtain agent requirements in each hour across a week. In this part we use data analysis, a queuing approximation, and a simulation model. The second part is about constructing optimization models for scheduling agents. We utilize two models; one for the case with no flexible workers, and another for the case with flexible workers. We include numerical experiments and analysis at the end to show the schedule optimization results under several scenarios. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.