A call center is a service network in which agents provide telephone-based services. Customers that seek these services are delayed in tele-queues.<p> <p>This paper summarizes an analysis of a unique record of call center operations. The data comprise a complete operational history of a small banking...</p></p>

Telephone call centers are an integral part of many businesses, and their economic role is significant and growing. They are also fascinating sociotechnical systems in which the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures. In these environments...

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a widely used tool for data analysis and dimension reduction in applications throughout science and engineering. However, the principal components (PCs) can sometimes be difficult to interpret, because they are linear combinations of all the original...

We propose a global smoothing method based on polynomial splines for the estimation of functional coefficient regression models for non-linear time series. Consistency and rate of convergence results are given to support the proposed estimation method. Methods for automatic selection of the...

Accurate forecasting of call arrivals is critical for staffing and scheduling of a telephone call center. We develop methods for interday and dynamic intraday forecasting of incoming call volumes. Our approach is to treat the intraday call volume profiles as a high-dimensional vector time...