Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call Center Performance

When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call Center Performance We study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following questions are addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing), and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while maintaining a prespecified service level target? We tackle these questions by characterizing control and staffing schemes that are asymptotically optimal in the limit, as the system load grows large. Our main finding is that a threshold priority control, in which cross-selling is exercised only if the number of callers in the system is below a certain threshold, is asymptotically optimal in great generality. The asymptotic optimality of threshold priority reduces the staffing problem to a solution of a simple deterministic problem in one regime and to a simple search procedure in another. We show that our joint staffing and control scheme is nearly optimal for large systems. Furthermore, it performs extremely well, even for relatively small systems. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Manufacturing & Service Operations Management INFORMS

When Promotions Meet Operations: Cross-Selling and Its Effect on Call Center Performance

19 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/informs/when-promotions-meet-operations-cross-selling-and-its-effect-on-call-00CBikUNxe

References (35)

Publisher
INFORMS
Copyright
Copyright © INFORMS
Subject
Research Article
ISSN
1523-4614
eISSN
1526-5498
DOI
10.1287/msom.1090.0281
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

We study cross-selling operations in call centers. The following questions are addressed: How many customer-service representatives are required (staffing), and when should cross-selling opportunities be exercised (control) in a way that will maximize the expected profit of the center while maintaining a prespecified service level target? We tackle these questions by characterizing control and staffing schemes that are asymptotically optimal in the limit, as the system load grows large. Our main finding is that a threshold priority control, in which cross-selling is exercised only if the number of callers in the system is below a certain threshold, is asymptotically optimal in great generality. The asymptotic optimality of threshold priority reduces the staffing problem to a solution of a simple deterministic problem in one regime and to a simple search procedure in another. We show that our joint staffing and control scheme is nearly optimal for large systems. Furthermore, it performs extremely well, even for relatively small systems.

Journal

Manufacturing & Service Operations ManagementINFORMS

Published: Jul 29, 2010

Keywords: Keywords : call centers ; cross-selling ; queueing systems ; many-server queues ; heavy traffic approximations ; steady-state analysis

There are no references for this article.