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Contact Centers with a Call-Back Option and Real-Time Delay Information

Stern School of Business, New York University, 44 West 4th Street, New York, New York 10012
Columbia Business School, 409 Uris Hall, 3022 Broadway, New York, New York 10027
marmony{at}stern.nyu.edu
c.maglaras{at}columbia.edu

Motivated by practices in customer contact centers, we consider a system that offers two modes of service: real-time and postponed with a delay guarantee. Customers are informed of anticipated delays and select their preferred option of service. The resulting system is a multiclass, multiserver queueing system with state-dependent arrival rates. We propose an estimation scheme for the anticipated real-time delay that is asymptotically correct, and a routing policy that is asymptotically optimal in the sense that it minimizes real-time delay subject to the deadline of the postponed service mode. We also show that our proposed state-dependent scheme performs better than a system in which customers make decisions based on steady-state waiting-time information. Our results are derived using an asymptotic analysis based on "many-server" limits for systems with state-dependent parameters.

Subject classifications: service networks; service level guarantees; multiclass queueing systems; call-back option; call centers; Halfin-Whitt regime; real-time delay notification.
History: Received June 2002; revision received January 2003; accepted July 2003.