On predicting a call center's workload: A discretization-based approach

• Autor(a) principal: Luís Moreira Matias
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Rafael Nunes, Michel Ferreira, João Mendes Moreira, João Gama
• Tipo de documento: Livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/82912
• topic: Inteligência artificial, Ciências da computação e da informação; Artificial intelligence, Computer and information sciences

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. Â(c) 2014 Springer International Publishing.