Operational Strategies for Customer Service: A Gatekeeper Framework

Abstract

Customer service has evolved beyond in-person visits and phone calls to include live chat, AI chatbots, and social media, among other contact options. Service providers typically refer to these contact modalities as “channels”. Within each channel, customer service agents are tasked with managing and resolving a stream of inbound service requests. Each request involves milestones where the agent must decide whether to keep assisting the customer or to transfer them to a more skilled – and often costlier – provider. To understand how this request resolution process should be managed, we develop a model in which each channel is represented as a gatekeeper system. We characterize the structure of the optimal gatekeeping policy and identify conditions under which threshold policies yield the optimal solution. We then turn to the broader question of strategic selection of an appropriate mix of service channels. We examine the channel mix problem for the special case where the service provider chooses among three channel architectures: live-agent-only, chatbot-only, or both, and show that, in equilibrium, all three architectures may emerge as optimal.

Keywords: Gatekeepers, Service Design, Chatbots, Dynamic Programming