Simulation And Optimization Of Shift Scheduling In Call Centers Based On Customer Behavior

As market competition becomes more intensified,modern enterprises allow to provide the customization products with high quality and to promote user satisfaction.Due to stochastic,diversity characteristics of user demand,competition among the enterprises gradually turns products to services,A model of servings with excellent quality and high efficiency has been a central issue in both firm management and academic circle.Thus,as one of service mode,call center has been widely used in many fields,such as finance,telecommunications and aviation,and has brought with it a rich and interesting set of focus for academic researches.To take account of the impact of the diversity of customer behavior on call center,the research on call center has gradually turn the queueing method on simple issue to the simulation method on complicated issue.As the technology of IVR((Interactive Voice Response)is promoted,the cost of operating call center has been gradually reduced.Hence,the research of effective human resource is very important for call center incorporating the use of IVR.The research is supported by National Nature Science Foundation under Grant 71271052,analyzes the impact of customer behavior on call center performance using simulation method,and carries out the research of shift scheduling.By finding the shortage of the traditional two-stage scheduling,this paper makes use of simulation-based heuristic algorithm to solve scheduling problems based on customer behavior,in a time-varying call center with single-skill.The major works of this paper are listed as follows:First,through general programming language(c++),this paper makes use of discrete event-based scheduling method to establish call center with customer behavior,and analyzes the impact of the retrial on system performance.Second,this paper establishes the two-stage scheduling model taking the probability of enter service,and analyzes the limitation of two-stage method by solving scheduling problems based on customer behavior,in a time-varying call center with single-skill.Third,through simulation-based genetic algorithm,this paper establishes joint scheduling model and compares it to the two-stage method.The simulation method is one of the important development tendency on stochastic problem in the future.The experiment results show that the discrete event-based scheduling method is effective to solve complicated scheduling problems based on customer behavior,in a time-varying call center with single-skill.Based on some theoretical assumptions,the conclusion of this paper is helpful to improve the efficiency of scheduling the call center with high human resource cost.