Like many others, the St. Louis Veterans Administration Medical Center (VAMC) Pharmacy help desk receives far more calls than can be processed by current staffing levels. The objective of the study is to improve pharmaceutical services provided by the call center, by using queueing theory and...

Motivated by a Bell Canada call center operating in blend mode, we consider a system with two types of traffic and two types of agents. Outbound calls are served only by blend agents, whereas inbound calls can be served by either inbound-only or blend agents. Inbound callers may talk or abandon....