Research on service center routing has largely assumed either fully codified automated routing, rational routing agents who can optimally route calls, or both. In practice, however, many routing scenarios are not fully codifiable, and human routing agents will likely exhibit biases in their routing decisions. In this paper, we explore the presence of behavioral inertia in service center routing. Inertia in this context is the propensity for routing agents to route issues more frequently to other agents with whom they have experience, rather than optimally routing those issues. We leveraged a unique dataset of more than 70,000 routing decisions in a complex service operations context to examine the presence of inertia and associated performance implications. We find that, overall, inertia hurts performance, but in certain situations can be beneficial. Inertia increases the probability of issue resolution when agents exhibit inertial behavior in routing to other agents with high expertise, and inertia positively impacts (decreases) service time for particularly difficult, complex customer issues. This study contributes to research in service center operations by studying a previously unexplored phenomenon of inertia in routing by human agents and provides valuable insights to practitioners who manage service centers.

中文翻译：

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服务中心路由的行为视角：惯性的作用

对服务中心路由的研究主要假设要么是完全编码的自动路由，要么是可以优化路由呼叫的合理路由代理，或者两者兼而有之。然而，在实践中，许多路由场景并不完全可编码，人工路由代理可能会在他们的路由决策中表现出偏差。在本文中，我们探讨了服务中心路由中行为惯性的存在。在这种情况下，惯性是路由代理更频繁地将问题路由到他们有经验的其他代理的倾向，而不是优化路由这些问题。我们在复杂的服务运营环境中利用了一个包含 70,000 多个路由决策的独特数据集来检查惯性的存在和相关的性能影响。我们发现，总的来说，惯性会损害性能，但在某些情况下可能是有益的。当座席在路由到具有高专业知识的其他座席时​​表现出惯性行为时，惯性会增加问题解决的可能性，而惯性会对特别困难、复杂的客户问题产生积极影响（减少）服务时间。本研究通过研究人类代理路由中以前未探索的惯性现象，为服务中心运营研究做出贡献，并为管理服务中心的从业者提供了宝贵的见解。