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Telephone call centers offer a convenient communication channel between businesses and their customers. Efficient management of call centers needs accurate modeling of customer waiting behavior, which contains important information about customer patience (how long a customer is willing to wait) and service quality (how long a customer needs to wait to get served). Hazard functions offer dynamic characterization of customer waiting behavior, and provide critical inputs for agent scheduling. Motivated by this application, we develop a two-way functional hazards (tF-Hazards) model to study customer waiting behavior as a function of two timescales, waiting duration and the time of day that a customer calls in. The model stems from a two-way piecewise constant hazard function, and imposes low-rank structure and smoothness on the hazard rates to enhance interpretability. We exploit an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm to optimize a penalized likelihood function of the model. We carefully analyze the data from a U.S. Bank call center, and provide informative insights about customer patience and service quality patterns along waiting time and across different times of a day. The findings provide primitive inputs for call center agent staffing and scheduling, as well as for call center practitioners to understand the effect of system protocols on customer waiting behavior. Supplementary materials for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A call center is a centralized hub where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organization. In today's economy, call centers have become the primary points of contact between customers and businesses. Thus accurate predictions of call arrival rates are indispensable to help call center practitioners staff their call centers efficiently and cost-effectively. This article proposes a multiplicative model for modeling and forecasting within-day arrival rates to a U.S. commercial bank's call center. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods are used to estimate both latent states and model parameters. One-day-ahead density forecasts for the rates and Counts are provided. The calibration of these predictive distributions is evaluated through probability integral transforms.. Furthermore, 1-day-ahead forecasts comparisons with classical statistical models are given. Our predictions show significant improvements of up to 25% over these standards. A sequential Monte Carlo algorithm is also proposed for sequential estimation and forecasts of the model parameters and rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]