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Live-chat agent assignments to heterogeneous e-customers under imperfect classification

Live-chat agent assignments to heterogeneous e-customers under imperfect classification Live-Chat Agent Assignments to Heterogeneous E-Customers under Imperfect Classi cation PAULO GOES, NOYAN ILK, The University of Arizona WEI T. YUE, and J. LEON ZHAO, City University of Hong Kong Many e-commerce rms provide live-chat capability on their Web sites to promote product sales and to offer customer support. With increasing traf c on e-commerce Web sites, providing such live-chat services requires a good allocation of service resources to serve the customers. When resources are limited, rms may consider employing priority-processing and reserving resources for high-value customers. In this article, we model a reserve-based priority-processing policy for e-commerce systems that have imperfect customer classi cation. Two policy decisions considered in the model are: (1) the number of agents exclusively reserved for highvalue customers, and (2) the con guration of the classi cation system. We derive explicit expressions for average waiting times of high-value and low-value customer classes and de ne a total waiting cost function. Through numerical analysis, we study the impact of these two policy decisions on average waiting times and total waiting costs. Our analysis nds that reserving agents for high-value customers may have negative consequences for such customers under imperfect classi cation. Further, we study http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS) Association for Computing Machinery

Live-chat agent assignments to heterogeneous e-customers under imperfect classification

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
2158-656X
DOI
10.1145/2070710.2070715
Publisher site
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Abstract

Live-Chat Agent Assignments to Heterogeneous E-Customers under Imperfect Classi cation PAULO GOES, NOYAN ILK, The University of Arizona WEI T. YUE, and J. LEON ZHAO, City University of Hong Kong Many e-commerce rms provide live-chat capability on their Web sites to promote product sales and to offer customer support. With increasing traf c on e-commerce Web sites, providing such live-chat services requires a good allocation of service resources to serve the customers. When resources are limited, rms may consider employing priority-processing and reserving resources for high-value customers. In this article, we model a reserve-based priority-processing policy for e-commerce systems that have imperfect customer classi cation. Two policy decisions considered in the model are: (1) the number of agents exclusively reserved for highvalue customers, and (2) the con guration of the classi cation system. We derive explicit expressions for average waiting times of high-value and low-value customer classes and de ne a total waiting cost function. Through numerical analysis, we study the impact of these two policy decisions on average waiting times and total waiting costs. Our analysis nds that reserving agents for high-value customers may have negative consequences for such customers under imperfect classi cation. Further, we study

Journal

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS) – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Dec 1, 2011

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