Contact centers with a
call-back option and real-time delay information
Mor Armony and Costis Maglaras, Submitted June 2002, last revision January 2003.
To appear in Operations Research
Abstract:
Motivated by customer contact centers, we consider a canonical model of systems that offer two modes of service: real-time and postponed with a delay guarantee. Customers are informed of anticipated delays and select their preferred option of service. The resulting system is a multi-class, multi-server queueing system with state dependent arrival rates. We propose an estimation scheme for the anticipated real-time delay that is asymptotically correct, and a routing policy that is asymptotically optimal in the sense that it minimizes real-time delay subject to the deadline of the postponed service mode. We also show that our proposed state-dependent scheme performs better than a system in which customers make decisions based on steady-state waiting time information. The analysis is based on the so called ``many-server" heavy-traffic limit for systems with state dependent parameters.
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