Abstract: Different from traditional customer service systems, online customer service systems offer business services for multiple customers simultaneously, which makes the adaptation and scheduling between service providers and customers a big challenge. Based on the characteristics of online customer service, this paper proposes a scheduling model for online customer service systems. The scheduling model is composed of three constituents: a multi-priority customer queue, the states of the scheduling system and the transition relations between them, and the correspondence between scheduling strategies and states of the system. Its scheduling algorithm is designed. Experiments verify the rationality of the scheduling model and the effectiveness of the scheduling algorithm. In comparison to the operating customer service system, the algorithm can not only considerably reduce the average waiting time of customers, but also achieve load balancing among service providers, when guaranteeing high quality of services.

Key words: online customer service system, scheduling model, scheduling algorithm, multi-queue, state transition