Modeling and analysis of workforce management decisions in modern call centers

Call centers have grown rapidly in the last two decades and are taking a vital role in today´s business processes. Many companies use their own call centers to monitor their customers´ satisfaction or to provide support services and that´s why they are concerned with the effective management of these call centers. A vital issue in call center management is workforce management or in other words determining the staffing levels, preparing staff schedules and assigning agents to these schedules “rostering”. In this paper we are going to present a literature survey for the related literature. Also, the paper introduces a framework for modeling and solving the agents´ staffing and scheduling problem using simulation based optimization.