Modeling and Evaluation of Call Centers with GSPN Models

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. It enjoys an annual growth rate of 20% and, overall, more than half of the business transactions are conducted over the phone. The design of such a system, and the management of its performance, surely must be based on sound scientific principles. Our goal in this paper is to survey the structure and technology of call center systems, point out some available special modeling and analysis tools, propose a high-level generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN) model, and evaluate the model, aiming to minimize the workload of agents (servers) in order to provide self-serve.