Forecasting in Multi-skill Call Centers: A Multi-agent Multi-service (MAMS) Approach: Research in Progress

Abstract

Workforce management is critical in call center business. Human resources are the highest cost, and therefore efficiency is a key success factor. On the other side relevant peaks of incoming calls have to be served. We here consider a complex case, with a many-to-many relationship between agents and services, i.e. the same agent serves many customers and the same customer may be served by many agents. In this perspective, we propose a model to forecast calls in long- and mid-term by ARIMA (Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average), and to size workforce in mid-term by integrating an Erlang model. Finally, we have developed a tool to forecast calls in a multi-agent multi-service call center. Field tests are running and first results validate our model.