Improving forecasting for telemarketing centers by ARIMA modeling with intervention

In this study we analyze existing and improved methods for forecasting incoming calls to telemarketing centers for the purposes of planning and budgeting. We analyze the use of additive and multiplicative versions of Holt-Winters (HW) exponentially weighted moving average models and compare it to Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) modeling with intervention analysis. We determine the forecasting accuracy of HW and ARIMA models for samples of telemarketing data. Although there is much evidence in recent literature that ''simple models'' such as Holt-Winters perform as well as or better than more complex models, we find that ARIMA models with intervention analysis perform better for the time series studied.