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The Gatekeeper’s Dilemma: 'When Should I Transfer This Customer?'

In many service encounters front-line workers (often referred to as gatekeepers) have the discretion to attempt to resolve a customer request, or to transfer the customer to an expert service provider within the organization. We study the gatekeeper’s transfer decision using an integrated approach that consists of a field study, an analytical model and a behavioral experiment. Drawing on a proprietary dataset of 9.8 million interactions between the customers and call center agents of a US-based Bank, we formulate and solve a dynamic finite-horizon model that characterizes the gatekeeper’s response to different incentive schemes and to different queueing dynamics. We then conduct experiments to examine how human behavior deviates from the normative implications of the model. We find that: 1) Simple bonus-based incentives lead to transfer behaviors that are broadly consistent with the model predictions; 2) Adding transfer penalties to a bonus- based system uniformly reduces transfer rates, even controlling for incentive differences; 3) Gatekeepers are able to incorporate the state of the queue into their decisions. Taken together, these results help provide behavioral underpinnings for future models of discretionary server behavior in queueing systems.