Matching and routing

When partners' traits are complements (each makes the other more productive), total output is highest with positive assortative matching: best with best. Shimer and Smith (2000, Econometrica 68(2): 343–370) show that search frictions can weaken this.

If your great rep is worth more on a great lead than on a poor one, pair them up. Close rate × lead value is multiplicative, and that's the definition of complements.

The "deferred-acceptance procedure … always leads to a stable outcome." The side that makes the offers gets its best stable matching. Roth and Shapley won the 2012 Nobel "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."

Matching is a solved problem you can design, whether it's territories, account assignment or routing, and your design choices decide who comes out ahead.

A review of call centers as systems where "the behavior of customers and employees is closely intertwined with physical performance measures," and where traditional queueing models are "fundamentally limited."

Read this before you challenge a speed-to-answer target. It's the base reference.

In large, busy systems where agents differ in speed, routing each caller to the fastest available agent first minimizes waiting.

Routing built for speed loads up your fastest agents. It optimizes waiting and leaves value out.

"There is a natural trade-off between minimizing customer wait time and fairly dividing the workload among agents of different skill levels." Their policy "outperforms a common routing policy used in call centers (that routes to the agent that has been idle the longest)."

Routing to whoever's been "longest idle" is the fairness default, and it has a measurable cost.

Agents "exhibit very different performance for the same call type." Simulations on a financial firm's data trace a trade-off curve: the best-resolution rule reached about 90.6% resolution with waits over 7 minutes, while a hybrid rule reached about 88.6% with about 18 seconds' wait.

It's the closest published evidence on routing by ability. You give up a little speed for better outcomes, and a smart hybrid rule gets you most of both.