Blended call center with idling times during the call service
研究了混合呼叫中心中，利用入站呼叫服务期间的休息时段来高效分配坐席时间，以最大化外拨任务吞吐量并满足入站等待时间约束，为管理者提供了路由优化指南。
We consider a blended call center with calls arriving over time and an infinitely backlogged amount of outbound jobs. Inbound calls have a non-preemptive priority over outbound jobs. The inbound call service is characterized by three successive stages where the second one is a break; i.e., there is no required interaction between the customer and the agent for a non-negligible duration. This leads to a new opportunity to efficiently split the agent time between inbound calls and outbound jobs. We focus on the optimization of the outbound job routing to agents. The objective is to maximize the expected throughput of outbound jobs subject to a constraint on the inbound call waiting time. We develop a general framework with two parameters for the outbound job routing to agents. One parameter controls the routing between calls and the other performs the control inside a call. We then derive structural results with regard to the optimization problem and numerically illustrate them. Various guidelines to call center managers are provided. In particular, we prove for the optimal routing that at least one of the two outbound job routing parameters has an extreme value.