Sandjai Bhulai. Dynamic routing policies for multi-skill call centers

Abstract. Modern call centers handle many types of calls, i.e., telephone calls, email, chat, and web-based services, while having many skills of servers. Skill-based routing technology allows for these distinctions by providing a call routing mechanism such that the service level is balanced against the efficiency in using the workforce. A standard approach to determine effective routing policies is via dynamic programming. For large call centers, however, this leads to a high-dimensional state space making the algorithm impractical. Much literature has focused on this problem by topology simplification and asymptotic analysis.

In this paper, we study the call routing problem for general network topologies. We provide a unifying approach to handle different designs for skill-based routing. The approach is based on constructing an approximate dynamic programming value function and then carrying out one step of policy improvement. Numerical results for various designs show that the policies have very good performance and are nearly optimal.