Creating Work Breaks from Available Idleness

We develop new rules for assigning available service representatives to customers in customer contact centers and other large-scale service systems in order to create effective work breaks for the service representatives from naturally available idleness. These are unplanned breaks occurring randomly over time. We consider both announced breaks as well as unannounced breaks. Our goal is to make the mean and variance of the interval between successive breaks suitably small. Given a target break duration, we propose assigning idle servers based on the elapsed time since their last break. We show that our proposed server-assignment rules are optimal for the many-server heavy-traffic (MSHT) fluid model. Extensive simulation experiments support the proposed server-assignment rules in practical cases and confirm the MSHT approximation formulas when the number of servers is very large.

The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2017.0682.