• Journal of Information Technology Services
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.17-35
• /
• 2019

Call centers do not simply play a role of responding to customers' calls, but they have developed into a core unit for maintaining competitiveness through services, marketing, or sales. Since the service quality of call centers heavily affects customer satisfaction, organizations have focused on enhancing it by reducing waiting time and increasing service level. One of the techniques, which improve the service quality of call centers, is to employ multi-skilled agents that can handle more than one type of calls. This study deals with three issues relevant to multi-skilled agents. First, we analyze how the way of allocating a specific group of agents to a set of skills affects the performance of call centers. Secondly, we investigate the relationship between the number of multi-skilled agents and the performance of call centers. Finally, we examine the impact of agent selection rules on the performance of call centers. Two selection rules are compared : the first rule is to assign a call to any available agent at random while the other rule is to assign a call preferably to single-skilled agents over multi-skilled agents when applicable. Based on simulation experiments, we suggest three implications. First, as the length of cycles in the agent-skill configuration network becomes longer, call centers achieve higher service level and shorter waiting time. Secondly, simulation results show that as the portion of multi-skilled agents increases, the performance of call centers improves. However, most of the improvement is attained when the portion of multi-skilled agents is relatively low. Finally, the agent selection rules do not significantly affect the call centers' performance, but the rule of preferring single-skilled agents tends to distribute the workload among agents more equally.