Manpower Planning Framework for a Hospital Contact Center with Service Level Requirements using Integer Programming

摘要

Hospital contact centers are responsible for handling telephonic interactions with patients that seek appointments with their desired provider. As a result, providing high quality service that increases patient satisfaction is very critical for hospital management. High quality service is impacted by rate of abandoned phone calls and average patient waiting time. One of the major contributors to high quality service is appropriate manpower planning; having the optimal number of staff at the right schedule to accommodate the stochastic incoming call demand. The optimal planning also eliminates redundant operation costs by avoiding both overstaffing and understaffing. A centralized contact center in an urban hospital is operating above the allocated budget. Hence, we focus on formulating the contact center manpower planning problem and solving it by exact algorithms in the presence of varying rate of hourly call volume. The result of this study will be useful as a reference solution for many other heuristic/metaheuristic algorithms including simulation models.