Study on the Workforce Scheduling and Routing Strategies of Heterogeneous Agents in Call Centers

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.099How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Agent heterogeneity, workforce scheduling, routing strategies, simulation, artificial bee colony algorithm

Abstract

The performance of call center operations is usually associated with two factors, agent scheduling shifts and calls routing strategy, and they are dependent to some extent. In order to decrease the operating cost greatly, call centers need to properly allocate human resources and determine appropriate routing strategies. Since agent heterogeneity exists in the call center service system, this paper no longer assumes that agent service rates are all the same. We construct an integer linear programming of the scheduling problem for call centers with agent heterogeneity, and combine the use of a discrete-event simulation model with an artificial bee colony algorithm to solve the model. We evaluate the performance of the call center through discrete-event simulation experiments, and the artificial bee colony algorithm takes this performance metric as a judgment condition for satisfying the constraints, and iteratively obtains a better scheduling solution. Finally, we compare the effects of three routing strategies on the control of labor costs in enterprise scheduling. The actual data of the call center proves that considering the scheduling scheme of heterogeneous agents and the fastest server first routing can significantly reduce labor cost, and achieve effective service management.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mengchen Wang
AU  - Xiuli Wang
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/14
TI  - Study on the Workforce Scheduling and Routing Strategies of Heterogeneous Agents in Call Centers
BT  - Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Economic and Business Management (FEBM 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 577
EP  - 583
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.099
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.201211.099
ID  - Wang2020
ER  -