Telephone traffic queues in a customer call center

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the unemployment claims filing call center operated by the Tennessee Department of Labor. To do this we primarily utilize traditional Erlang models to analyze performance measure such as call blocking wait times and labor utilization. We find that some modifications to staffing levels at both down times and peak times would improve the aforementioned performance measures. Some limitations to this study are the limited availability of data, thus some assumptions were made. The data used is also form year 2008, so it is difficult to predict staffing levels necessary in the future, though methods are utilized to achieve this task. However, 2008 was year in which the call center experienced both consistently slow to moderate traffic loads in the first part of the year and very heavy traffic loads in the latter portion. As a result, 2008 is a good year in which to highlight the challenges managers face in adjusting capacity to meet swift fluctuations in demand