Benefits of cross-training in a skill-based routing contact center with priority queues and impatient customers

Customer contact centers that provide different types of services to customers who place phone calls or send e-mail messages are studied. Customers calling are impatient; hence phone requests have a higher priority over e-mail messages. E-mails that are not responded to within a specified time limit can be prioritized. The goal of this paper is to assess the performance improvement via cross-training the agents. The performance of contact centers operated under different strategies are compared. An extensive simulation study is presented that shows that strategies permitting pre-emptive-resume policies provide the best performance for phone calls. The results also demonstrate that limited cross-training with two skills per agent results in considerable performance improvements. However, the unbalanced traffic intensities due to different mean service times for each class necessitate more cross-training at three skills per agent to have considerable improvement. [Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of IIE Transactions for the following free supplemental resource: Appendix of additional simulation results]