Expanding Service Capabilities Through an On-Demand Workforce

Call Center Staffing: On-Demand Is in Demand Traditional call centers face challenges in quickly adapting their service capacity to meet fluctuations in demand, even with short staffing periods. In their research article “Expanding Service Capabilities Through an On-Demand Workforce,” Sun and Liu propose a solution for call centers to improve service levels and reduce operating expenses. They develop a two-stage decision model that determines the optimal combination of permanent and on-demand staff, along with an optimal on-demand staffing and call scheduling policy that minimizes costs. By utilizing diffusion approximation, they derive approximate solutions for the second-stage problem. The optimal staffing rule employs switching boundaries to determine when to bring in or dismiss on-demand agents, while the scheduling rule employs a nested threshold rule that prioritizes customer urgency. Interestingly, the call scheduling rule exhibits an intriguing pattern arising from the interaction between on-demand staffing and call scheduling decisions. Their research findings highlight significant cost savings achievable through the implementation of an on-demand workforce.