Abstract: In evaluation of the service efciency of a contact center, besides the customer satisfaction, the turnover rate of agents is also a major concerned index of the contact center among operation and management. To reduce the turnover rate of agents in contact centers, we establish a shift scheduling model about agents by considering the agent's fatigue, multiskill agents, multi-channel service and the limit of agent-skill and task-channel routing capacity which is caused by the actual operations situation of the majority of current contact centers. By solving the model, we give the optimal scheduling scheme to reduce the work fatigue of agents as much as possible under the given stafng level in contact centers. Finally, by adopting the LINGO language we apply the model to some contact centers to analyze the data and verify the correctness and validity of the model by comparing with other scheduling schemes. The model not only provides an effective scheduling solution to contact centers, but also plays important reference to other service felds.

Key words: multi-skill, multi-channel, routing capacity limits, contact centers, fatigue