Contact centers face operational challenges - proxies for customer experience are subject to uncertainty. A main source is silent abandonment customers (Sab). Sab leave while in queue with no indication. As a result, capacity is wasted. We develop methodologies to identify Sab and to estimate patience. We show how accounting for Sab in a queueing model improves the estimation accuracy of key measures of performance. Finally, we suggest strategies to operationally cope with Sab.

In the service industry, it is common that companies send agents to perform tasks at customer locations. Thereby, many companies rely on their agent's ability to construct tours manually. These manual tours are often non-optimal, causing high travel cost. In our work, we developed a new agent-to-customer assignment approach, designed to promote the manual construction of distance minimal tours. In our experimental study we investigate its effect on the human routing performance.

We study how consumers decide to pay with loyalty points or money by developing a model and estimating it on airline loyalty program data. We find that mental accounting, subjective perceived value, and reference exchange rate of points play important roles, and consumers’ primary points earning source and total earning level are jointly associated with their attitudes toward points and money. We show how a firm can implement pricing policies to efficiently influence consumers’ payment choices.