Customer Service Operations: A Gatekeeper Framework
This study addresses the trade-off between cost and service quality in multichannel customer service by modeling the entire service process as a gated system. It jointly optimizes decisions across three levels: strategic (channel deployment), tactical (staffing and AI allocation), and operational (real-time scheduling). Leveraging operations research, dynamic modeling, and numerical simulation, the work derives a structured optimal request-handling policy and uncovers a counterintuitive insight: judicious deployment of AI chatbots not only enhances service efficiency but also significantly improves service quality, thereby achieving simultaneous optimization of cost and customer experience.