Workforce management in omnichannel service centers with heterogeneous channel response urgencies

Workforce staffing and assignment decisions are of critical importance for meeting the challenge of minimizing operational costs while providing satisfactory customer service. These decisions are particularly challenging for omnichannel service centers, where customers can request services via different communication channels (e.g., phone, e-mail, live-chat, social media) that have different service quality and response requirements. We present a formulation of the omnichannel workforce management problem that accounts for variations in response urgencies of different channels as well as diminishing agent performances due to channel switching. We develop an algorithm that efficiently provides solutions for this problem and determines the number and channel allocation of service agents within the service center. Through numerical experiments, we study the performance of the algorithm among various service center configurations with equal cost characteristics. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm can identify service center structures that outperform many alternative structures, including those commonly-adopted in the real-world. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.