Maximizing potential revenue and profitability performance continues to be a key objective for Direct Checks as the company’s core product - personal checks - moves through the decline stage of the product life cycle; and, the department with the most potential to positively impact the...

This thesis presents an analysis of the benefits of cross-training between the claims division and calls division in a large health insurance call center by building a discrete-event simulation model of the call center. The simulation model was built in Rockwell Software's Arena v. 7.0 using a...

This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to...

Die sich ständig verändernden Märkte und Marktgegebenheiten, Innovationen im Bereich der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie sowie die Erneuerung des allgemeinen Wertesystems in Verbindung mit einem weiter steigenden Wettbewerbsdruck auf die Unternehmen führen unmittelbar dazu, dass...

In diesem Aufsatz wird der Fragestellung nachgegangen, ob neuronale Netze in der Lage sind Kennzahlen für Warteschlangensysteme zu approximieren. Da für die meisten in der Praxis vorkommenden Warteschlangenprobleme keine exakten, expliziten Lösungen für die Warteschlangenkennzahlen...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

Business process outsourcing (BPO) generally refers to the operation of letting out the task of performing particular functions of an enterprise to another, often a third party and, in some cases, its own subsidiary. Under the pressure of nonavailability of manpower in the country of origin,...

In this paper, we examine the process of technical support work and the role of knowledge in enhancing the productivity of such work. We develop the concepts of problem-solving tasks and moves to describe technical support work, while using call resolution time and problem escalation as measures...

In this paper, we present a modulated Poisson process model to describe and analyze arrival data to a call center. The attractive feature of this model is that it takes into account both covariate and time effects on the call volume intensity, and in so doing, enables us to assess the...