Modelling service levels in a call centre with an agent-based model

Emergency services call centres rely on rapid call processing time to provide assistance to the community. The role of the call centre is to gain sufficient and accurate information in a timely manner to pass to the despatch operators to facilitate such a response. This paper is one step in building an agent-based model of a multi-queue emergency services call centre to generate practices that lead to better customer service level performance at reduced costs through more efficient resource allocation. In this paper, the authors model the operation of a single queue call centre and examine the service level performance parameter. The authors' results show the sensitivity of service level as call and agent parameters are varied and that different methods of calculating the service level can lead to differing results.