科研之友
微信
新浪微博
Facebook
分享链接
摘要
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide delay announcements for call centers with hyperexponential patience modeling. The paper aims to employ a state-dependent Markovian approximation for informing arriving customers about anticipated delay in a real call center. Design/methodology/approach - Motivated by real call center data, the patience distribution is modeled by the hyperexponential distribution and is analyzed by its realistic significance, with and without delay information. Appropriate M/M/s/r + H-2 queueing model is structured, including a voice response system that is employed in practice, and a state-dependent Markovian approximation is applied for computing abandonment. Based on this approximation, a method is proposed for estimating virtual delays, and it is investigated about the problem of announcing virtual delays to customers upon their arrival. Findings - There are two parts of findings from the results obtained from the case study and a numerical study of simulation comparisons. First, using an H-2 distribution for the abandonment distribution is driven by an empirical study which shows its good fit to real-life call center data. Second, simulation experiments indicate that the model and approximation are reasonable, and the state-dependent Markovian approximation works very well for call centers with larger pooling. It is concluded that our approach can be applied in a voice response system of real call centers. Originality/value - Many results pertain to announcing delay information, customer reactions and links to estimating hyperexponential distribution based on real data that have not been established in previous studies; however, this paper analytically characterizes these performance measures for delay announcements.
