Design and Control of Customer Service Chat Systems

49 Pages Posted: 26 Nov 2011

See all articles by Tolga Tezcan

Tolga Tezcan

University of Rochester - Simon Business School

Date Written: November 24, 2011

Abstract

We consider customer service chat (CSC) systems where customers can receive real time service from agents using an instant messaging (IM) application over the Internet. A unique feature of these systems is that agents can serve multiple customers simultaneously. The number of customers that an agent is serving, referred to as the level of that agent, determines the rate at which each customer assigned to that agent receives service. We propose a staffing LP to find the optimal number of agents required to satisfy a service level constraint. The service level is measured in terms of the average time a customer spends in the system in the long run. The staffing LP not only finds the total number of agents needed, but also determines how all the agents should be allocated among different levels in the long run. We provide closed form solutions for the staffing LP and then propose routing policies, both for the cases when the arrival rate is observable and for when the rate is unobservable. We show that these routing policies minimize the expected time in the system and achieve the allocation of agents obtained from the optimal solution of the staffing LP in the long run asymptotically. We also prove that the staffing solution obtained from the staffing LP along with the routing policies we propose is asymptotically optimal for large systems. We illustrate the effectiveness of our solution procedure in moderate to large size systems via numerical and simulation experiments.

Suggested Citation

Tezcan, Tolga, Design and Control of Customer Service Chat Systems (November 24, 2011). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1964434 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1964434

Tolga Tezcan (Contact Author)

University of Rochester - Simon Business School ( email )

Rochester, NY 14627
United States

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