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Scheduling policies to minimize abandonment costs in infomercial call centers

Author

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  • Sina Ansari
  • Laurens Debo
  • Seyed M.R. Iravani

Abstract

Infomercial call centers answer calls in an order that reduces the number of abandoned calls to minimize lost revenue. We study a multi-class queuing system with a single server and customer abandonment, motivated by the case of infomercial call centers. We fully characterize the structure of the server’s optimal scheduling policy that minimizes the long-run average customer abandonment cost. We show that the optimal service policy is a static priority policy. We derive sufficient conditions under which the so-called bμ–rule is optimal. Under the bμ–rule, it is optimal to give priority to the customer type that has a higher service rate (μ) and higher abandonment cost (b), i.e., higher index bμ. We numerically test the robustness of our proposed policy in more general settings, including multi-server infomercial call centers.

Suggested Citation

  • Sina Ansari & Laurens Debo & Seyed M.R. Iravani, 2025. "Scheduling policies to minimize abandonment costs in infomercial call centers," IISE Transactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(5), pages 524-540, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:uiiexx:v:57:y:2025:i:5:p:524-540
    DOI: 10.1080/24725854.2024.2331583
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