Bayesian Analysis of Abandonment in Call Center Operations

In this paper we consider modeling abandonment behavior in call centers. We present several time to event modeling strategies and develop Bayesian inference for posterior and predictive analyses. Different family of distributions, piecewise time to abandonment models and mixture models are introduced and their posterior analysis is carried out using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We illustrate implementation of the proposed models using real call center data, present additional insights that can be obtained from the Bayesian analysis and discuss implications for different customer profiles.