Abstract
Agent scheduling in call centers is a major management problem as the optimal ratio between service quality and costs is hardly achieved. In the literature, regression and time series analysis methods have been used to address this problem by predicting the future arrival counts. In this paper, we propose to discretize these target variables into finite intervals. By reducing its domain length, the goal is to accurately mine the demand peaks as these are the main cause for abandoned calls. This was done by employing multi-class classification. This approach was tested on a real-world dataset acquired through a taxi dispatching call center. The results demonstrate that this framework can accurately reduce the number of abandoned calls, while maintaining a reasonable staff-based cost.
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Moreira-Matias, L., Nunes, R., Ferreira, M., Mendes-Moreira, J., Gama, J. (2014). On Predicting a Call Center’s Workload: A Discretization-Based Approach. In: Andreasen, T., Christiansen, H., Cubero, JC., Raś, Z.W. (eds) Foundations of Intelligent Systems. ISMIS 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8502. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08326-1_59
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08326-1_59
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-08325-4
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