Simulation-based Performance Analysis For Call Centers With Impatient Customers

This paper is part of output for the research of the National Natural Foundation of China (71271052) about "scheduling optimization studies of multi-skilled call center integration considering the behavior of customers and employees ". With the rapid development of economy and increasing competition between the enterprises, customer service is becoming more and more important and a call center is an effective way for companies to improve their competitiveness as a service center. So a study on customer patience behavior in the call center can not only reflect the actual situation to provide more accurate information to operators, but also provide theoretical support for the optimization of system.This paper mainly based in the form of a single queue in the single-skill call center, in the system, customer perform as balking or reneging, and study the impact of the call center with impatient customers on system performance. As the traditional analytical methods is difficult to accurately describe and analyze the call center with impatient customer, so the paper choosed the system simulation methods.First, this paper analyzed the customer’s patience behavior in the call center system, quantified the performance in the system, and built the simulation model of the system with the Flexsim simulation software. The difficulty of this model lies in the embodiment of customer patience behavior. Through the numerical simulation research and comparison between the call centers of considering and un-considering the customer patience behavior, the paper pointed out that the call center of considering customer patience behavior can obtain more accurate reference information and is better to avoid excess configuration, thus reducing the operating costs of the system.Then, on the basis of the simulation model considering customer patience behavior, the paper designed a numerical simulation experiment according to the proportion of impatient customers and patience time which both result in the customer patience behavior, then studied the influence of customer patience behavior under different scenarios on the system. The study found that customer patience had an influence on the customers’behavior in the system. What’s more, the more impatient the customers are in the system, the shorter the response time of the system will be.Finally, in order to abate the negative impact of the invisible queue information in the call center to the customer patient behavior, this call center system added a notification function of waiting time, and improved the patient behavior of customers at the same time. After receiving the delay information, customers can decide whether enter the waiting queue according to their own patient time. If they choose to enter the queue, the system will update their patience randomly according to the announcement and the original patient time. This paper established the system simulation model, and found that notices waiting time and customer’s patience update parameters had no influence on the system of human resource configuration through numerical analysis but mainly affect the give-up behavior of customers in the system.