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.
