Overview of Research Problems on Customer Contact Centers, e.g., Telephone Call Centers

• WW, Stochastic Models for the Design and Management of Customer Contact Centers: Some Research Directions. Working paper, March 2002.

Stabilizing Performance with Time-Varying Arrivals

• Otis B. Jennings, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey and WW, Server Staffing to Meet Time-Varying Demand. Management Science, vol. 42, No. 10, 1996, pp. 1383-1394.

• Zohar Feldman, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey and WW, Staffing of Time-Varying Queues to Achieve Time-Stable Performance, Management Science, vol. 54, No.2, February 2008, pp. 324-338.

• Yunan Liu and WW, Stabilizing Customer Abandonment in Many-Server Queues with Time-Varying Arrivals, Operations Research, Operations Research, vol. 60, No. 6, November-December 2012, pp. 1551-1564.

Real-Time Delay Estimation and Prediction to Make Delay Announcements

• Rouba Ibrahim and WW, Real-Time Delay Estimation in Overloaded Multiserver Queues with Abandonment. Management Science, vol. 55, No. 10, October 2009, pp. 1729-1742.

• Mor Armony, Nahum Shimkin and WW, The Impact of Delay Announcements in Many-Server Queues with Abandonment. Operations Research, vol. 57, No. 1, January-February 2009, pp. 66-81.

The Fundamental Queueing Principle L = lambda*W (Little's law)

• WW, A Review of L = W and Extensions. Queueing Systems, vol. 9, No. 3, 1991, pp. 235-268.

• Song-Hee Kim and WW, Statistical Analysis with Little's Law. Working paper, 2012. Submitted to Operations Research.

• Song-Hee Kim and WW, Estimating Waiting Times with the Time-Varying Little's Law. Working paper, 2012. Forthcoming in Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences.

Motivating Call-Center Agents: Preference-Based Routing

• Michael J. Sisselman and WW, Value-Based Routing and Preference-Based Routing in Customer Contact Centers. Production and Operations Management, vol. 16, No. 3, May-June 2007, pp. 277-291.

• Michael J. Sisselman and WW, Empowering Customer-Contact Agents Via Preference-Based Routing. SeatLink White Paper paper, 2005.

• Michal Borin and Peter Bamberger, The impact of structural empowerment on individual well-being and performance: Taking agent preferences, self-efficacy and operational constraints into account. Human Relations, vol. 63, No. 2, 2010, pp.163-191.

For more research papers, see Research Publications by Ward Whitt.