A simulation based decision support system for workforce management in call centers

Abstract

Workforce Management is critical in the call centers where thousands of calls are handled by hundreds of agents everyday. In a call center, where the call arrival rates tend to flutuate during the day, the agent allocation plans are required to be planned flexible and the number of operating call center agents ought to be updated whenever needed, in order to keep the customer satisfaction level over a predefined level. Workforce plans are usually generated by the use of queuing models that are based on Erlang-C calculations. However, they have assumptions that oversimplify the real system and jeopardize the validation of the model. At this point, the simulation models, which do not have such restrictive assumptions, are becoming popular in calculating the required number of agents for each time period and measuring the performance of a given shift schedule. The combination of the advantages of simulation with a flexible and user-friendly decision support system environment provides more effective and efficient workforce planning and performance reporting in call centers. In this study, a simulation based decision support system, DSS is developed that runs on real time dta for one of the largest call centers in Turkey. The graphical user interfaces, GUIs are designed in accordance to the man-machine interaction consideration to increase the usability, functionality and effectiveness of the DSS.