Department of Business AdministrationDepartment of Industrial Engineering2024-11-0920151059-147810.1111/poms.122592-s2.0-84926322842http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/poms.12259https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/14480The problem of estimating delays experienced by customers with different priorities, and the determination of the appropriate delay announcement to these customers, in a multi-class call center with time varying parameters, abandonments, and retrials is considered. The system is approximately modeled as an M(t)/M/s(t) queue with priorities, thus ignoring some of the real features like abandonments and retrials. Two delay estimators are proposed and tested in a series of simulation experiments. Making use of actual state-dependent waiting time data from this call center, the delay announcements from the estimated delay distributions that minimize a newsvendor-like cost function are considered. The performance of these announcements is also compared to announcing the mean delay. We find that an Erlang distribution-based estimator performs well for a range of different under-announcement penalty to over-announcement penalty ratios.EngineeringManufacturing engineeringOperations researchManagement scienceJournal Article1937-5956352542500006Q14282