A method for estimation of redial and reconnect probabilities in call centers

In practice, many call center forecasters use the total inbound volume to make forecasts. In reality, besides the fresh calls (initial call attempts), there are many redials (re-attempts after abandonments) and reconnects (re-attempts after answered calls) in call centers. Neglecting redials and reconnects will inevitably lead to inaccurate forecasts, which eventually leads to inaccurate staffing decisions. However, most of the call center data sets do not have customer-identity information, which makes it difficult to identify how many calls are fresh. Motivated by this, the goal of this paper is to estimate the number of fresh calls, and the redial and reconnect probabilities. To this end, we propose a model to estimate these three variables. We formulate our estimation model as a minimization problem, where the actual redial and reconnect probabilities lead to the minimum objective value. We validate our estimation results via real call center data and simulated data.