Balancing Agent Retention and Waiting Time in Service Platforms
Andrés Musalem, Marcelo Olivares, Daniel Yung
Abstract
The gig economy open a new business model in which services have access to a large pool of workers that are compensated based on their actual production, which can be useful to operate at lower levels of utilization to improve response times to customers. However, having a large pool of workers with low utilization may lower their motivation and increase employee turnover, which can hurt productivity in the long run. “Balancing Agent Retention and Waiting Time in Service Platforms” looks at this tradeoff and provides a data-driven approach to manage worker capacity in on-demand service platforms, showing evidence through a real-world application of an outbound call center with freelance agents.
Topics & Concepts
ProductivityService (business)Computer scienceBusinessProduction (economics)On demandOperations managementIndustrial organizationMarketingMicroeconomicsEconomicsCommerceMacroeconomicsTransportation and Mobility InnovationsSharing Economy and PlatformsDigital Economy and Work Transformation