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Queueing Models of Call Centers: An Introduction

Article  in  Annals of Operations Research · July 2002

DOI: 10.1023/A:1020949626017 · Source: DBLP

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Annals of Operations Research 113 (2002) 41–59 41

Queueing Models of Call Centers: An Introduction

Ger Koole

Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Avishai Mandelbaum ∗

Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel

This is a survey of some academic research on telephone call centers. The surveyed
research has its origin in, or is related to, queueing theory. Indeed, the “queueing-view”
of call centers is both natural and useful. Accordingly, queueing models have served as
prevalent standard support tools for call center management. However, the modern call
center is a complex socio-technical system. It thus enjoys central features that challenge
existing queueing theory to its limits, and beyond.
The present document is an abridged version of a survey that can be downloaded from
www.cs.vu.nl/obp/callcenters and ie.technion.ac.il/∼serveng.
Keywords: call centers, queueing models

1. Introduction

Call centers, or their contemporary successors contact centers, are the preferred
and prevalent way for many companies to communicate with their customers. The call
center industry is thus vast, and rapidly expanding in terms of both workforce and
economic scope. For example, it is estimated that 3% of the U.S. and U.K. workforce is
involved with call centers, the call center industry enjoys a annual growth rate of 20%
and, overall, more than half of the business transactions are conducted over the phone.
(See callcenternews.com/resources/statistics.shtml for a collection of call center
statistics.)
Within our service-driven economy, telephone services are unparalleled in scope,
service quality and operational efficiency. Indeed, in a large best-practice call center,
many hundreds of agents could cater to many thousands of phone callers per hour;
agents utilization levels could average between 90% to 95%; no customer encounters
∗ Research partially supported by the ISF (Israeli Science Foundation) grant 388/99-02, by the Technion
funds for the promotion of research and sponsored research, and by Whartons’ Financial Institutions
Center
42 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

a busy signal and, in fact, about half of the customers are answered immediately; the
waiting time of those delayed is measured in seconds, and the fraction that abandon
while waiting varies from the negligible to mere 1-2% (e.g., see Figures 2 and 3). The
design of such an operation, and the management of its performance, surely must be
based on sound scientific principles. This is manifested by a growing body of academic
multi-disciplinary research, devoted to call centers, and ranging from Mathematics and
Statistics, through Operations Research, Industrial Engineering, Information Technology
and Human Resource Management, all the way to Psychology and Sociology. (The
bibliography [35] covers over 200 research papers.) Our goal here is to survey part of this
literature, specifically that which is based on mathematical queueing models and which
potentially supports Operations Research and Management.

1.1. What is a call center?

A call center constitutes a set of resources (typically personnel, computers and

telecommunication equipment), which enable the delivery of services via the telephone.
The working environment of a large call center could be envisioned as an endless room
with numerous open-space cubicles, in which people with earphones sit in front of com-
puter terminals, providing tele-services to unseen customers. Most call centers also sup-
port Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units, also called Voice Response Units (VRU’s),
which are the industrial versions of answering machines, including the possibilities of
interactions. But more generally, a current trend is the extension of the call center into
a contact center. The latter is a call center in which the traditional telephone service is
enhanced by some additional multi-media customer-contact channels, commonly VRU,
e.mail, fax, Internet or chat (in that order of prevalence).
Most major companies have reengineered their communication with customers via
one or more call centers, either internally-managed or outsourced. The trend towards
contact centers has been stimulated by the societal hype surrounding the Internet, by
customer demand for channel variety, and by acknowledged potential for efficiency gains.

1.2. Technology

The large-scale emergence of call centers, noticeably during the last decade, has
been enabled by technological advances in the area of Information and Communication
Technology (ICT). First came PABX’s (Private Automatic Branch Exchanges, or sim-
ply PBX), which are the telephone exchanges within companies. A PABX connects,
via trunks (telephone lines), the public telephone network to telephones within the call
centers. These, in turn, are staffed by telephone agents, often called CSR’s for Cusomer
Service Representatives, or simply “rep’s” for short. Intermediary between the PABX
and the agents is the ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) switch, whose role is to dis-
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 43

tribute calls among idle qualified agents. A secondary responsibility of the ACD is the
archival collection of operational data, which is of prime importance as far as call center
research is concerned. While there exists a vast telecommunications literature on the
physics of telephone-traffic and the hardware (technology) of call centers, our survey fo-
cuses on the service contact between customers and agents, sometimes referred to as the
service’s “moment of truth”.
Advances in information technology have contributed as importantly as telecom-
munication to the accelerated evolution of call centers. To wit, rather than search for a
paper file in a central archive, that renders impossible an immediate or even fast handling
of a task related to that file, nowadays an agent can access, almost instantaneously, the
needed file in the company’s data base. A new trends in ICT is the access of customer
files in an automatic way. The relevant technology is CTI (Computer Telephony Integra-
tion), which does exactly what its name suggests. In fact, this can go further. Consider,
for example, a customer who seeks technical support from a telephone help-desk. That
customer can be often automatically identified by the PABX, using ANI (Automatic
Number Identification). This triggers the CTI to search for the customer’s history file;
information from the file then pops up on the agent’s computer screen, detailing all poten-
tially relevant support for the present transaction, as well as pointers for likely responses
to the support request. Having identified the customer’s need, this could all culminate
in an almost instantaneous automatic e.mail or fax that resolves the customer’s problem.
In a business setting, CTI and ANI are used to identify, for example, cross- or up-selling
opportunities and, hence, routing of the call to an appropriately skilled agent.

1.3. The world of call centers

Call centers can be categorized along many dimensions: functionality (help desk,
emergency, tele-marketing, information providers, etc.), size (from a few to several thou-
sands of agent seats), geography (single- vs. multi-location), agents charateristics (low-
skilled vs. highly-trained, single- vs. multi-skilled), and more. A central characteristic
of a call center is whether it handles inbound vs. outbound traffic. (Synonyms for in-
bound/outbound are incoming/outgoing.) Our focus here is on inbound call centers,
with some attention given to mixed operations that blend in- and out-going calls. An
example of such blending is when agents are utilizing their idle time to call customers
that left IVR requests to be contacted, or customers that abandoned (and had been
identified by ANI) to check on their wishes. Pure outbound call centers are typically
used for advertisement or surveys - they will be only briefly described (and contrasted
with pure inbound and mixed operations) in Subsection 3.5.
Modern call/contact centers however are challenged with multitude types of calls,
coming in over different communication channels (telephone, internet, fax, e.mail., chat,
44 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

mobile devices, etc.); agents have the skill to handle one or more types of calls (e.g., they
can provide technical support for several products in several languages by telephone,
e.mail or chat). Furthermore, the organizational architecture of the modern call center
varies from the very flat, where essentially all agents are exposed to external calls, to the
multi-layered, where a layer represents say a level of expertise and customers could po-
tentially be transferred through several layers until being served to satisfaction. Further
yet, a call center could in fact be the virtual embodiment of few-to-many geographically
dispersed call centers (from the very large, connected over several continents - for exam-
ple, mid-West U.S.A. with Ireland and India - to the very small, constituting individual
agents that work from their homes in their spare time).

1.4. Management and quality of service

There exists a large body of literature on the management of call centers, both in
the academia (Section VII in [35] contains close to 50 references) and even more so in
the trade literature.
Typically, call center goals are formulated as the provision of service at a given
quality, subject to a specified budget (more on this momentarily). While Service Quality
is a very complicated notion, to which numerous articles and books have been devoted
[25,9,21], a highly simplified approach suffices for our purposes. We measure service
quality along two dimensions: qualitative (psychological) and quantitative (operational).
The former relates to the way in which service is provided and perceived (am I satisfied
with the answer, is the agent friendly, etc.; for example, [49]). The latter relates more to
service accessibility (how long did I have to wait for an answer, was I forced into calling
back, etc.). Models in support of the qualitative aspects of service quality are typically
empirical, originating in the Social Sciences or Marketing (see Sections III, IV and VIII
in [35]). Models in support of quantitative management are typically analytical, and here
we focus on the subset of such models that originates in Operations Research in general
and Queueing Theory in particular.
Common practice is that upper management decides on the desired service level and
then call center managers are called on to defend their budget. Similarly, costs can be
associated with service levels (eg. toll-free services pay out-of-pocket for their customers’
waiting), and the goal is to minimize total costs. These two approaches are articulated
in [11]. It occurs, however, that profit can be linked directly to each individual call, for
example in sales/mail-order companies. Then a direct trade-off can be made between
service level and costs so as to maximizes overall profit. Two papers in which this is done
are [4] and [2]. In what follows we concentrate on the service level vs. cost (efficiency)
trade-off. The fact that salaries account for 60–70% of the total operating costs of a
call center justifies our looking mostly at personnel costs. This is also the approach
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 45

adopted by workforce management tools, that are used on a large scale in call centers.
By concentrating on personnel, one presumes that other resources (such as ICT) are not
bottlenecks (see however the work of [1,2]).

1.5. Performance measures

Operational service level is typically quantified in terms of some congestion or per-

formance measures. Our experience, backed up by [21], suggests a focus on abandonment,
waiting and/or retrials, which underscores the natural fit between queueing models and
call centers (Subsection 1.7).
Performance measures are of course intercorrelated - see [50] for the remarkably
linear relation between the fraction of abandoning customers and average waiting time.
They could also convey more information that actually meets the eye. For example, in
contrast to waiting statistics which are objective, abandonment and retrial measures are
subjective in that they incorporates customers’ view on whether the offered service is
worth its wait (abandonment) or returning to (retrials). As another example, it turns
out that one can quantify customers’ patience in terms of the ratio between the fraction
abandoned to the fraction served - indeed, it is shown in [39] that this ratio can be also
interpreted as that between the average time that customers are willing to wait to the
average time that they expect to wait.
For performance measures to be useful, they must be archived at a proper resolution
and observed at the appropriate frequency. Ideally, one would like to store, for each
individual transaction at the call center, its operational and business characteristics. This
raw data can then be mined for exploratory purposes, or aggregated into performance
measures for management use. For example, Figure 3 exhibits the prevailing standard,
under which operational data is averaged over half-hour intervals. Such an averaging,
however, is insufficient for deeper needs, as amply demonstrated in [39].

1.6. A scientific approach to management

In the practice of call center management, a quantitative approach often amounts to

merely monitoring performance and intervening if that is considered necessary. The call
center manager tracks performance indicators and reacts when they reach unacceptable
levels; for example, too many customers are waiting or too many agents are idle. These
reactions are typically based on subjectively-biased experiences, and a decision is doomed
“poor” or “wrong” if the resulting performance turns out worse than expected.
In a more scientific approach, management is pro-active rather than reactive -
for example, ensuring that waiting is scarce rather than adding agents when waiting
becomes excessive. Here quantitative models - analytical or simulation - turn out useful
for developing rules-of-thumb and intuition, or practically supporting design and control.
46 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

For example, the “what-if” scenarios in the Introduction to [11] demonstrate, via a
simple analytical model, that call centers are typically extremely sensitive to changes
in underlying parameters; this is closely related to the square-root principle for staffing,
which is a rule-of-thumb that is presented below. Models have in fact become integral
parts of the widely used workforce scheduling tools; but such uses rarely go beyond the
rudimentary M/M/s (Erlang-C) queue, let alone the more sophisticated models that are
surveyed in Section 3.

1.7. Queueing Theory and Science

Queues in service operations are often the arena where customers, service providers
(servers, or agents) and managers establish contact, in order to jointly create the service
experience. Process-wise, queues play in services much the same role as inventories in
manufacturing. But in addition, “human queues” express preferences, complain, aban-
don and even spread around negative impressions. Thus, customers treat the queueing
experience as a window to the service-providing party, through which their judgement
of it is shaped for better or worse. Managers can use queues as indicators (queues are
the means, not the goals) for control and improvement opportunities. Indeed, queues
provide unbiased quantifiable measures (these are not abundant in services), in terms of
which performance is relatively easy to monitor and goals are naturally formulated.
Research in quantitative call center management is concerned with the development
of scientifically-based design principles and tools (often culminating in software), that
support and balance service quality and efficiency, from the likely conflicting perspectives
of customers, servers, managers, and often also society. Queueing models constitute a
natural convenient nurturing ground for the development of such principles and tools
[24,11]. However, the existing supporting (Queueing) theory has been somewhat lacking,
as will now be explained.
The bulk of what is called Queueing Theory, consists of research papers that for-
mulate and analyze queueing models with a realistic flavor. Most papers are knowledge-
driven, where “solutions in search of a problem” are developed. Other papers are
problem-driven, but most do not go far enough in the direction of a practical solu-
tion. Only some articles develop theory that is either rooted in or actually settles a
real-world problem, and scarcely few carry the work as far as validating the model or
the solution [26,29]. In concert with this state of affairs, not much is available of what
could be called Queueing Science, or perhaps the Science of Congestion, which should
supplement traditional queueing theory with empirically-based models [50], observations
[39] and experiments [45,34]. In call centers, and more generally service networks, such
“Science” is lagging behind that in telecommunications, computers, transportation and
manufacturing. Key reasons for the gap seem to be the difficulty of measuring service op-
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 47

Figure 1. Operational Scheme of a Simple Call Center.

erations (see Section 2), combined with the need to incorporate human factors (which are
notoriously difficult to quantify) - see Subsection 3.2 for a discussion of human patience
while waiting in tele-queues.

1.8. Call centers as queueing systems

Call centers can be viewed, naturally and usefully, as queueing systems. This
comes clearly out of Figure 1, which is an operational scheme of a simple call center.
(See Subsection 3.1 for an elaboration.)
In a queueing model of a call center, the customers are callers, servers (resources)
are telephone agents (operators) or communication equipment, and tele-queues consist
of callers that await service by a system resource. The simplest and most-widely used
such model is the M/M/s queue, also known in call center circles as Erlang C. For
most applications, however, Erlang C is an over-simplification: for example, it assumes
out busy signals, customers impatience and services spanned over multiple visits. These
features are captured in Figure 1, which depicts a single finite-queue with abandonment
[24] and retrials [48,29]. But the modern call center is often a much more complicated
queueing network: even the mere incorporation of an IVR, prior to joining the agents’
tele-queue, already creates two stations in tandem [15], not to mention having multiple
teams of specialized or cross-trained agents [23,10], that are geographically dispersed over
multiple interconnected call centers [32], and who are faced with time-varying loads [38]
of calls by multi-type customers [5,2].

1.9. Keeping up-to-date

A fairly complete list of academic publications on call centers has been compiled in
[35]. There are over 200 publications, arranged chronologically within subjects, each with
its title and authors, source, full abstract and keywords. Given the speed at which call
48 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

center technology and research are evolving, advances are perhaps best followed through
the Internet, for example using a search engine.

2. Data

Any modeling study of call centers must necessarily start with a careful data anal-
ysis. For example, the simplest Erlang C queueing model of a call center requires the
estimation of calling rate and mean service (holding) times. Moreover, the performance
of call centers in peak hours is extremely sensitive to changes in its underlying parame-
ters. (See Figure 3, and the discussion in Subsection 3.2.) It follows that an extremely
accurate estimation/forecasting of parameters is a prerequisite for a consistent service
level and an efficient operation.
Section II in [35] lists only 16 papers on the statistics and forecasting of call center
data. Given the data-intensive hi-tech environment of modern call centers, combined
with the importance of accurate estimation, it is surprising, perhaps astonishing, that so
little research is available and so much is yet needed. (Compare this state-of-affairs with
that of Internet and telecommunication - here, only few year ago, a fundamental change
in the research agenda was forced on by data analysis, which revealed new phenomenon,
for example heavy-tails and long-range-dependence.)
There is a vast literature on statistical inference and forecasting, but surprisingly
little has been devoted to stochastic processes and much less to queueing models in
general and call centers in particular (see Section II in [35] for some exceptions). Indeed,
the practice of statistics and time series in the world of call centers is still at its infancy,
and serious research is required to bring it to par with its needs.
We distinguish between three types of call center data: operational, marketing,
and psychological. Operational data is typically collected by the Automatic Call Distrib-
utor (ACD), which is part of the telephony-switch infrastructure (typically hardware-,
but recently more and more software-based). Marketing or Business data is gathered
by the Computer Telephony Integration/Information (CTI) software, that connects the
telephony-switch with company data-bases, typically customer profiles and business his-
tories. Finally, psychological data is deduced from surveys of customers, agents or man-
agers. It records subjective perceptions of service level and working environment, and
will not be discussed here further.
Existing performance models are based on operational ACD data. The ultimate
goal, however, is to integrate data from the three sources mentioned above, which is
essential if one is to understand and quantify the role of (operational) service-quality as
a driver for business success.
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 49

3. Performance models

The essence of operations management in a call center is the matching of service

requests (demand) with resources (supply). The fundamental tradeoff is between service
quality vs. operational efficiency. Performance analysis supports this tradeoff by cal-
culating attained service level and resource occupancy/utilization as functions of traffic
load and available resources. We start with describing the simplest such models and then
expand to capture main characteristics of today’s highly complex contact centers.

3.1. Single-type customers and single-skill agents

A schematic operational model of a simple call center is depicted in Figure 1. The

connotation is that of the old-times switch board, either those operated by telephone
companies or as part of individual organizations, where telephone operators were con-
necting incoming calls physically to the proper extension/line. (Old papers on telephone
services, as the classical Erlang [18] and Palm [41], were in fact modeling such switch
boards.) Modern technology has now replaced these human operators by the ACD, that
routes customers calls to idle agents. What renders the operation depicted above, as well
as its model, “simple” is that there is a single type of calls that can be handled by all
agents (statistically identical customers and servers).
The simplest and most used performance model is the stationary M/M/s queue. It
describes a single-type single-skill call center with s agents, operating over a short enough
time-period so that calls arrive at a constant rate, yet randomly (Poisson); staffing level
and service rates are also taken constant. The assumed stationarity could be problem-
atic if the system does not relax fast enough, for example due to events such as an
advertisement campaign or a mew-product release. The model assumes out busy signals,
abandonment, retrials and time-varying conditions.
The reason for using the M/M/s queue is of course the fact that there exist
closed form expressions for most of its performance measures. However, M/M/s pre-
dictions could turn out highly inaccurate because reality often “violates” its underly-
ing assumptions, and these violations are not straightforward to model. For example,
non-exponential service times leads one to the M/G/s queue which, in stark contrast
to M/M/s, is analytically intractable. One must then resort to approximations, out
of which it turns out that service time affects performance through its coefficient-of-
variation C = E/σ). Performance deteriorates (improves) as stochastic variability in ser-
vice times increases (decreases). An empirical comparison between M/M/s and M/G/s
models can be found in [48].
When modeling call centers, the useful approximations are typically those in heavy-
traffic, namely high agents’ utilization levels at peak hours. Consider again the M/G/s
queue. For small to moderate number of agents s, Kingman’s classical result asserts
50 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

that Waiting Time is approximately exponential, with mean as given above. Large s, on
the other hand, gives rise to a different asymptotic behavior. This was first discovered
by Halfin and Whitt [28] for the M/M/s queue, and recently extended to M/P H/s in
[43]. We now discuss these issues within the context of two key challenges for call center
management: agent staffing and economies of scale.

Square-root safety staffing The square-root safety-staffing principle, introduced formally

in [11] but having existed long before, recommends a number of servers s given by
√
s = R + ∆ = R + β R , −∞ < β < ∞ ,

where R = µλ is the offered load (λ=arrival rate, µ=service rate) and β represents service
grade. The actual value of β depends on the particular model and performance criterion
used, but the form of s is extremely robust and accurate. As an example, for the M/M/s
queue analyzed in [11], β could be taken a positive function of the ratio between hourly
staffing and delay costs, ∆ is called the safety staffing. It is shown in [11] that the square-
root principle is essentially asymptotically optimal for large heavily-loaded call centers
(λ ↑ ∞, s ↑ ∞), and it prescribes operation in the rationalized (Halfin-Whitt) regime.
The square-root principle is applicable beyond M/M/s (Erlang C). [24] verify it
for the M/M/s model with abandonment (Subsection 3.2) - here β can take also nega-
tive values, since abandonment guarantee stability at all staffing levels; for time-varying
models, as in [31], β varies with time; and [12] uses it for skill-based routing. Finally,
[43] supports the principle for the M/G/s queue, given service times that are square
integrable. (Extensions to heavy-tailed service times would plausibly give rise to safety
staffing with power of R other than half.)
√
In all the extensions of [11], only the form s = R + β R was verified, theoretically
or experimentally, but the determination of the exact value of β, based on economic
considerations, is still an important open research problem. The square-root principle
embodies another operational principle of utmost importance for call centers - economies
of scale (EOS) - which we turn to.

Operational regimes and economies of scale Consider a typical situation that we en-
countered at a large U.S. mail-catalogue retailer. At the peak period of 10:00-11:00 a
number of 765 customers customers called; service time is about 3.75 minutes on average
with an after-call-work of 30 seconds and auxiliary work to the order of 5% of the time;
ASA is about 1 seconds and only 1 call abandoned. But there were about 95 agents
handling calls, resulting in about 65% utilization - clearly a quality-driven operation.
At the other extreme there are efficiency-driven call centers: with a similar offered
work as above, ASA could reach many minutes and agents are utilized very close to 100%
of their time.
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 51

Figure 2. Performance of 12 call centers in the rationalized regime.

Within the quality-driven regime, almost all customers are served immediately upon
calling. At the efficiency-driven regime, on the other hand, essentially all customers
are delayed in queue. However, as explained in [11] and elaborated on momentarily,
well-managed large call centers operate within a rationalized regime, where quality and
efficiency are balanced in the face of scale economies. This is the case in Figure 2,
summarizing the performance of 12 call centers, operated by a large U.S. health insurance
company: one observes a daily average of 2.8% abandonment (out of those called), 31
second ASA, 318 seconds AHT (Average Handling Time, namely service duration), with
91% agents’ utilization (and over 95% in a couple of the call centers). Only about 40% of
the customers were delayed while the other 60% accessed an agent immediately without
any delay.
The rationalized regime was first identified in practice by Sze [48], from which we
loosely quote the following: “The problems faced in the Bell System operator service
differ from queueing models in the literature in several ways: 1. Server team sizes during
the day are large, often 100-300 operators. 2. The target occupancies are high, but
are not in the heavy traffic range. Approximations are available for heavy and light
traffic systems, but our region of interest falls between the two. Typically, 90-95% of the
operators are occupied during busy periods, but because of the large number of servers,
only about half of the customers are delayed.” Theory that supports the rationalized
regime was first developed by Halfin and Whitt [28]. Thus large call centers operate
in a regime that seems to circumvent the traditional tradeoff between service-level and
resource-efficiency - EOS is the enabler.
As a practical illustration of EOS, consider multiple geographically dispersed call
centers. By interconnecting them properly (dynamic load balancing), performance can
52 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

get close to that of a single virtual call center, thus exploiting fully the economies of
scale. This is the case in Figure 2, the header of which reads “Command Center Intraday
Report”: and indeed, load balancing is exercised from a single Command Center that
overseas the 12 call centers represented in the table. An ACD that distributes calls to
several call centers is often referred to as a network-ACD.
[46] analyzes the problem of setting routing probabilities, but more can be gained
if routing is completely dynamic. [32] compares two basic strategies for a network-
ACD: a centralized FIFO vs. a distributed strategy that routes an arriving call to the
call center with least expected delay. Both strategies require information-exchange over
the network. While FIFO is much more taxing, it could nevertheless be still inferior,
given certain delays in switching calls between centers. This paper provides references
to previous works on the subject, by the same group at AT&T.

3.2. Busy signals and abandonment

Each caller within a call center occupies a trunk-line. When all the lines are occu-
pied, a calling customer gets a busy signal. Thus, a manager could eliminate all delays
by dimensioning the number of lines to be equal to the number of agents. in which case
M/M/s/s, or Erlang-B (“B” for Blocking) becomes the “right” model. But then there
would typically be ample busy-signals. Moreover, prevailing practice goes in fact the
other way: it is to dimension amlple lines so that a busy signal becomes a rare event.
But then customers are forced into long delays. This is costly for the call center (think 1-
800 costs) and possibly also for the customers - they might well prefer a busy-signal over
an information-less delay, and hence they abandon the tele-queue before being served.
The busy-signal vs. delay vs. abandonment trade off has not yet been formally
and fully analyzed, to the best of our knowledge. A simulation study of M/M/s/B is
presented in [20], where B stands for the overall number of lines (B ≥ s); it is argued
that only 10% lines in excess of agents provides good performance: more lines would
give rise to too much waiting and fewer to too many busy signals. A more appropriate
framework would be the M/M/s/B+G queue, where +G indicates arbitrarily distributed
patience (following the notation and results of [7]). An analytically tractable model is the
M/M/s/B +M , in which patience is assumed exponential. (For mathematical details see
[44], pages 109–112, and [24].) Procedures for estimating the mean patience, as an input
parameter to performance analysis, are given in [24,39]. Alternatively, mean patience
could be used as a tuning parameter, where its value is determined to establish a fit
between practice and theory - this will be the approach taken in the following example.
In heavy traffic, even a small fraction of busy-signals or abandonment could have
a dramatic effect on performance, and hence must be accounted for. This will now be
demonstrated via the M/M/s + M model [41,7,24], which adds an abandonment feature
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 53

Figure 3. Performance of a large call center in the rationalized regime.

to M/M/s (Erlang C): specifically, one models customers’ patience as exponentially

distributed, independently of everything else; customers abandon if their patience expires
before they reach an agent. We shall refer to the M/M/s + M queue as Erlang A, “A”
for Abandonment, and for the fact that this model interpolates between Erlang B and
Erlang C.
A model for a call center with busy-signals should be M/M/s/B + M , to account
for the existence of B lines. Performance analysis of the M/M/s/B + M queue has been
implemented at www.4callcenters.com. In this example, there were sufficiently many
lines so that the busy signal phenomenon was negligible. We thus use Erlang A.
Consider Figure 3, which summarizes the daily operation of the Charlotte call center
from Figure 2. Note the significant differences in performance over the busy half-hour
periods while, on the other hand, the numbers of calling customers, as well as AHT and
the number of agents working (“on production”) do not seem to vary that significantly.
Let us understand these performance differences. For example, during the period 10:30-
11:00, the absence of only 5 agents (out of the 223 working) would likely result in almost
doubling of both ASA and the fraction abandoning. We arrived at this projection by
choosing the average of customers’ patience (30 minutes) so that the predicted theoretical
performance was close to the observed one. Interestingly and significantly, a model in
which average patience is 30 minutes differs dramatically from a model which does not
acknowledge abandonment (“infinite patience”): with our parameters, the latter would
54 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

give rise to an unstable system (agents are required to be busy “more than 100%” of
their time); stability could nevertheless be achieved by adding only 2 agents (225 all
together), but in this case ASA would get close to 7 minutes - an order of magnitude
error in predicting performance if one ignores abandonment (that is, if one uses Erlang C
instead of Erlang A). We strongly recommend Erlang A as the standard to replace the
prevalent Erlang C model.
[15] considers a call center with a finite number of lines, exponential patience
and, prior to waiting, an IVR message of constant-duration. The model is thus a two-
dimensional network, allowing for only approximations. Brandt & Brandt [14] solve the
system with generally distributed patience (times to abandonment) and a finite number
of lines. Also Brandt & Brandt [13] study a system with generally distributed patience
and a secondary “call back” queue; again, this gives rise to approximations of a two-
dimensional network.
[40] takes another perspective: they assume that rational customers compare their
expected remaining waiting time with their subjective value of service. They provide
evidence why rational callers should abandon at some time while being queued. Finally,
[50] provides numerical evidence for the thesis of rational adaptive customers and present
a new model for abandonment (simpler and more practical than that in [40]). For a
discussion on service levels, including abandonment, we recommend [16].
Reality is even more complicated than described above, as demonstrated by the fol-
lowing reasoning. Decisions on agent staffing must take into account customer patience;
the latter, in turn, is influenced by the waiting experience which, circularly, depends on
staffing levels. An appropriate framework, therefore, is that of an equilibrium (Game
Theory), arrived at through customer self-optimizing and learning. This is the perspec-
tive of [40] and [50], which constitutes merely a first step. In [40], abandonment arises
as an equilibrium behavior of rational customers who optimaly compare their expected
remaining waiting time with their subjective value of service. In [50], the model of [40]
is simplified, which enables some support for adaptive behavior (learning) of customers.
Up to now we did not take into account the fact that callers that were blocked or
that abandonned might try again at a later moment. This leads to retrial models (see
[6,17,19]). Up to now retrial queues are little used in the context of call centers.
In [1], a model is considered where computer resources are assumed the bottlenecks,
and hence they are explicitly modeled. Here all agents compete, in a processor sharing
manner, for the same computer resource. This leads to certain counterintuitive phenom-
ena: for example, performance levels could decrease as the number of agents increase.
(In fact, [1] analyses a multi-skill environment.)
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 55

3.3. Performance over multiple intervals and overload

To make the translation to intra-day performance, and thus to inhomogeneous Pois-

son arrivals, (weighted) sums of interval performances are taken, where for each interval
another call arrival rate is taken. [27] calls this the pointwise stationary approximation.
An alternative idea would be to take the average arrival rate, and use this as input for
a performance model. This can give extremely bad results, even if the occupancy is
constant; see [26,27].
Standard modeling applications for call centers use stationary performance mea-
sures for each interval, say of 30 minutes duration. This works in general pretty well.
But exceptions arise with abrupt significant changes in arrival rate, particularly when
overload occurs during one or more intervals. Then a backlog is built up, and nonsta-
tionarity has to be accounted for. As already mentioned, such a behavior could arise
from an external event, such as advertising a telephone number on TV, or when the call
center opens in the middle of the day. Such abrupt overloads can be modeled with the
help of fluid models, as in [37]. These results are extended in [38]. Unfortunately these
fluid approximations work less well in underload situations, as has been argued in [3].
A numerical way to include nonstationary behavior is described in [22]. [31] proposes
staffing guidelines, which were developed heuristically and gave rise to a time-varying
square-root staffing principle.

3.4. Skill-based routing: on-line and off-line

The operational characteristics of multi-type/channel multi-skill contact centers

could get very complicated [23]. Simply conceptualize a call center of say a large Eu-
ropean company, which provides technical support in all major European languages for
a broad product line. Nevertheless, and out of necessity, most call centers are multi-
type multi-skill operations, and hence practice is here awaiting theoretical research for
guidelines.
If each skill has dedicated agents, then of course the call center can be regarded as
several independent single-skill call centers operating in parallel. But then one does not
exploit the economies of scale, due to resource flexibility, of a large call center with multi-
skill agents. At the other extreme, complete flexibility where all agents can do all tasks
(for example, be able to support all products in all languages) is typically unrealistic.
Thus a compromise must be struck where a subset of tasks, which we refer to as a skill,
can be performed by a subgroup of agents - namely a skill group. Skills of different skill
groups could overlap, which enables the benefits from economies of scale without the
need to train all agents at all skills.
The operational challenges are then both off- and on-line. One should determine
off-line the overall number of agents required of each skill, which are to be part of the
56 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

company’s permanent or temporary pool of agents; and out of these, how many and who
should occupy a given shift. On-line, one should determine for an idling agent which
caller to attend to first; and for an arriving call, who will be the agent to cater to it.
In this section we survery on-line problems. The off-line issues are related to human
resource management and are not discussed here.
Skill-based routing refers to the on-line strategy that matches callers and agents.
It is nowadays part of any advanced ACD, often provided as a list of options that man-
agers can choose from, but without any guidelines to accompany them. We now survey
some related available research. For more information, readers are referred to the short
literature survey in [23] and the OR and Simulation sections in [35].
[23] constitutes an introduction to skill-based routing and its operational complex-
ities. Via simulation, it is demonstrated there that advantages can be considerable,
already for simple scenarios. [42] provide a useful brief introduction to both theory and
practice.
A common way of implementing skill-based routing is by specifying two selection
rules: agent selection - how does an arriving call select an idle agent, if there is one; and
call selection - how does an idle agent select a waiting call, if there is one. Here are some
details. Agents are first divided into groups such that all agents within the group share
the same skills. In general, several groups could have the same skill. The PABX/ACD
contains, for each skill, an ordered list of agent groups containing that skill. An arriving
call for a certain skill is then assigned to the first group in the list that has an agent
available. When no agent with the right skill is available, then the call is assigned to the
first agent with the skill that becomes available. If an available agent can handle each one
of several waiting calls, then some priority rule is employed in order to determine which
call to handle first. As far as we know, this common protocol has not been analyzed
analytically.
If one leaves out the possibility that a call finds all agents occupied, then a flow of
calls of a certain type from one agent group to the next group occurs only if all agents are
occupied, i.e., it is overflow. These are notoriously hard to analyze, see [30], because the
overflow process is not Poisson. The performance of this type of an overflow queueing
network in the context of call centers is studied in [33].
It is also possible to program a PABX in such a way that a call is assigned to a group
only if there is at least a certain threshold number of agents available for service. Thus
agents are reserved idle for future high-priority calls while low-priority calls are presently
waiting to be served. This becomes useful if a group has skills of varying importance,
and it is advisable to reserve several agents free for the most important call types.
Although the above protocol is commonplace, it is certainly not optimal. E.g.,
it can occur that the last agent with skill A is occupied by a call of skill B, while
there are multiple agents available with skills B and C. This effect cannot be avoided
 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers 57

by changing the routing lists, due to the random behavior of the system. In fact, to
reach optimal routing, one has to take the number of available agents in all groups into
account. This way the routing becomes completely dynamic. The standard way to
solve this type of problems is by Dynamic Programming. Unfortunately, it is impossible
to apply standard Dynamic Programming to identify the optimal assignment, neither
theoretically (the problem as of now seems too hard) nor practically, due to the so-called
curse of dimensionality [8]: the number of possible configurations is exponential in the
number of agent groups, making it numerically infeasible to apply standard algorithms
from Markov decision theory. One way to overcome the problem’s complexity is to
consider simple structures and specific strategies. For example, [42] consider a two-
channel system, where waiting customer are assigned an aging factor, proportional to
their waiting time. Then customers with the largest aging factor is chosen for service.
Alternatively, one could analyze provably-reasonable approximations, for example [12].
Both [42] and [12] consider the on-line routing problem as well as the of-line staffing
problem - namely, how many agents are to be available for answering calls so as to
maintain an acceptable grade of service. ([12] actually applies the square-root staffing
principle.)

3.5. Call blending and multi-media

Different multi-media services require differing response times. Specifically, tele-

phone services should be responded to within seconds or minutes and, once started,
should not be interrupted; e.mail and fax, on the other hand, can be “stored” towards
response within hours or days, and can definitely be preempted by telephone calls, and
then resumed; chat services are somewhere in between. In [36] a mathematical asymp-
totic framework of Markovian Service Networks is developed, where multi-type customers
are served according to preemptive-resume priority disciplines. The pitives of a Marko-
vian service network are time-varying, abandoment and retrials are accomodated, and
the asymptotics is in the rationalized (Halfin-Whitt) regime. The framework of [36] is
thus applicable for performance analysis of large multi-media call centers - as indeed was
done in [37,38]. Note however that the framework can not accommodate non-preemptive
priority disciplines or finite buffers (busy-signals).
We now continue with models that include IVR and e.mail. Brandt and Brandt [13],
already mentioned in the context of abandonment, propose a (birth-and-death) queue-
ing model for a call center with impatient callers and an integrated IVR: callers that
are patient enough, and which have been waiting online beyond a given threshold, are
then transferred to (“stored in”) an IVR-queue; the latter is served later, as soon as no
customers are waiting online, and the number of idle agents exceeds another threshold.
Armony and Maglaras [5] establish the asymptotic optimality in equilibrium of such a
58 Koole and Mandelbaum / Queueing Models of Call Centers

threshold strategy, when customers act rationally. By this we mean that customers who
are not served immediately optimize among balking, abandoning, or opting for a return
call (or a later e.mail) if they assess their anticipated delay as exceeding its worth. The
equilibrium formulation is inspired (but differs from) [40,50]; the asymptotics is taken in
the rationalized (Halfin-Whitt) regime.
If we mix traffic from multiple channels, then additional questions arise. Histori-
cally, these questions first arose in the context of mixing inbound and outbound traffic,
but they are also applicable to multi-media traffic. The solution is called call blending,
where agents are made to switch between inbound and outbound traffic, depending on
the traffic loads of inbound traffic. A mathematical model for call blending is presented
and solved in Bhulai & Koole [10].
Pure outbound Call centers are becoming more prevalent, mainly in surveys and
tele-marketing. They use devices called predictive dialers that automatically call up
customers, according to a prepared list. In order to reduce idleness of the most expensive
call center resource, its agents, it often happens that the PABX calls the next customer
on the list while, in fact, there are no agents available to take the call. Thus, the central
problem is balancing between agent productivity (is there always a customer right away?)
and customer dissatisfaction (no agent is idle while a customer picks up the phone), in
a manner that is consistent with the company-specific relative importance of these two
goals. For more information on predictive dialers, see Samuelson [47].
Acknowledgements G.K. would like to thank Sandjai Bhulai and Geert Jan Franx
for their useful comments on the very first version of this paper, and an anonymous
referee (of a different paper) for pointing out some sources of which he was not aware.
Some of the writing was done while A.M. was visiting Vrije Universiteit - the hospi-
tality of G.K. and the institutional support are greatly appreciated. A.M. thanks Sergey
Zeltyn for his direct and indirect contribution to the present project: Sergey helped in
the preparation of the figures and tables, and he is the co-producer of the material from
ie.technion.ac.il/∼serveng which was used here. Thanks are also due to Sergey and
Anat Sakov for their approval of importing pieces of [39].

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