How many agents should we have on staff with which particular skills?

How should we schedule these agents' shifts, breaks, lunches, training, meetings and other activities?

How quickly do we want to respond to each type of inbound call?

How should we cross-train our agents?

How should we route our calls to make the best use of these resources?

Given a forecast, a routing design, and an agent schedule, how well will our systems perform?

What has changed since we did our last forecast and published our schedules?

If the changes are significant, what can I do to respond to minimize the impact on the rest of the day or week?

There are a variety of mathematical methods and associated software to help call center personnel as they try to address these types of questions, most notably workload forecasting models based on time series and agent scheduling optimization solutions. However, over the past several years, simulation has emerged to play an important role in the call center design and management arena.

Next

* Contributed by -
Sameer Nagi & Harsha Rajan Israni,
Management Development Institute,
Gurgaon.