Profit-oriented shift scheduling of inboundcontact centers with skills-based routing,impatient customers, and retrials

This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approachfor inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agentclasses with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with differentneeds. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they haveto wait, and that they may retry. A discrete-time modeling approach is usedto capture the dynamics of the system due to time-dependent arrival rates.Staffing levels and shift schedules are simultaneously optimized over a setof different approximate realizations of the underlying stochastic processesto consider the randomness of the system.[...]