Reference no: EM132237889
A small call center, staffed by only one operator (server), has 20 customers calling every hour with a standard deviation of inter-arrival times of 3 minutes. (This results in a ca2 = 1.) The activity time for a call center operator to process each call (by addressing the caller’s queries) is, on average, 2.5 minutes with a standard deviation of 8 minutes (or a ce2 = 10.24), primarily because of the wide variety of caller queries. (Hint: Consider these processing times to be General not Exponential.)
A) What is the average time that a caller has to wait in line before getting served by the call center operator?
B) What is the average number of callers who are in the call center system(either waiting or being served by the operator)?
C) What is the probability that the server will be busy as a %, i.e. what percentage of the time will the staff members be busy? (If your answer is 20%, write 20 in the box).
D) Suppose that for every minute of time a caller waits for service the call center is required to pay out a penalty of 60 cents. The cost of hiring a qualified call center operator (identical to the current operator) is $12 per hour. What is the estimated hourly penalty pay out by the call center for caller wait times? (Hint: To answer this question, consider how long the average customer spends waiting in line and how many customers might arrive in an hour.)
E) How many new operators would you hire? a. 0 b. 1 c. 2 d. 3
F) In addition to potentially changing the number of call center operators, if you were asked to consider mechanisms to improve the call center, what would you target for improvement and how might the improvement be achieved?