Abstract
Many e-commerce firms provide live-chat capability on their websites to promote product sales and to offer customer support. With increasing traffic on e-commerce websites, providing such live-chat services require good allocation of service resources to serve the customers. When service resources are limited, firms could prefer to serve more valuable customers first in order to obtain the most revenue. In this paper, we consider a priority scheme to determine the order of customers to be served in an e-commerce live-chat system that employs imperfect customer profiling. Two decision variables considered in our priority model are: 1.) the number of servers exclusively reserved for preferred customers, and 2.) false positive and false negative rates selected for the profiling system. We find out that both relative expected values of the customer types and the profiler configuration play important roles to identify optimal policies. Given the imperfectness of the profiling system, high specificity configurations that lead to less falsely valued customers may not be the best strategy when reservation policies are already in place.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of 20th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems |
| Publisher | Social Science Research Network |
| State | Published - 2010 |
| Event | 20th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, WITS 2010 - St. Louis, MO, United States Duration: Dec 11 2010 → Dec 12 2010 |
Other
| Other | 20th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, WITS 2010 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| City | St. Louis, MO |
| Period | 12/11/10 → 12/12/10 |
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Keywords
- Customer service
- Electronic commerce
- Priority processing
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Information Systems
Cite this
Live-chat agent assignments in two-class e-customer queues under imperfect profiling. / Goes, Paulo B; Ilk, Noyan; Yue, Wei T.; Zhao, J. Leon.
Proceedings of 20th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems. Social Science Research Network, 2010.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Live-chat agent assignments in two-class e-customer queues under imperfect profiling
AU - Goes, Paulo B
AU - Ilk, Noyan
AU - Yue, Wei T.
AU - Zhao, J. Leon
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Many e-commerce firms provide live-chat capability on their websites to promote product sales and to offer customer support. With increasing traffic on e-commerce websites, providing such live-chat services require good allocation of service resources to serve the customers. When service resources are limited, firms could prefer to serve more valuable customers first in order to obtain the most revenue. In this paper, we consider a priority scheme to determine the order of customers to be served in an e-commerce live-chat system that employs imperfect customer profiling. Two decision variables considered in our priority model are: 1.) the number of servers exclusively reserved for preferred customers, and 2.) false positive and false negative rates selected for the profiling system. We find out that both relative expected values of the customer types and the profiler configuration play important roles to identify optimal policies. Given the imperfectness of the profiling system, high specificity configurations that lead to less falsely valued customers may not be the best strategy when reservation policies are already in place.
AB - Many e-commerce firms provide live-chat capability on their websites to promote product sales and to offer customer support. With increasing traffic on e-commerce websites, providing such live-chat services require good allocation of service resources to serve the customers. When service resources are limited, firms could prefer to serve more valuable customers first in order to obtain the most revenue. In this paper, we consider a priority scheme to determine the order of customers to be served in an e-commerce live-chat system that employs imperfect customer profiling. Two decision variables considered in our priority model are: 1.) the number of servers exclusively reserved for preferred customers, and 2.) false positive and false negative rates selected for the profiling system. We find out that both relative expected values of the customer types and the profiler configuration play important roles to identify optimal policies. Given the imperfectness of the profiling system, high specificity configurations that lead to less falsely valued customers may not be the best strategy when reservation policies are already in place.
KW - Customer service
KW - Electronic commerce
KW - Priority processing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84900390839&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84900390839&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84900390839
BT - Proceedings of 20th Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems
PB - Social Science Research Network
ER -