Performance analysis of a call center with interactive voice response units. (Q703289)

Consider a Markovian model of a call center with Poisson input, \(N\) trunk lines and a number (not less than \(N\)) of telephone sales agents. As a rule, a call center contains also the automatic call distributor (ACD) and a voice response unit (VRU). If a trunk line is free, then arriving call spends (exponential) time at the VRU. Then it may leave the system or is routed to an agent for an assistance (or wait at ACD until an agent becomes free). Once a call completes its transaction with an agent it releases both the trunk line and the agent. A call finding all trunk lines and agents busy is lost. To find the probability of the loss, the system is described as a two-station tandem network with multiserver stations. A two-dimensional Markov chain (the number of busy trunk lines and the number of busy agents) is studied to obtain the stationary distribution of the number of calls in the center. Numerical examples are included and a relation with the known Erlang's loss formula is discussed.