BizTravel.com is a travel Web site that recently announced “BizTravel Guarantee,

Question

BizTravel.com is a travel Web site that recently announced “BizTravel Guarantee,” putting money behind customer-service guarantees. a. One of the items in the BizTravel guarantee states, “If your customer service e-mail is not responded to within two hours, we’ll pay you $10.” Customers currently send e-mails to service@biztravel.com. The e-mail server of BizTravel equally distributes these e-mails to the specific address of each of the five CSRs. For example, one-fifth of the e-mails are directed to the mailbox of CSR1@biztravel.com, another one-fifth to CSR2@biztravel.com, and so on. Collaborative Inc. has developed collaborative software for customer relationship management that allows the firm to keep all customer service requests in a central mailbox and dynamically route the e-mails based on agent availability. Do you think the software from Collaborative Inc. will help BizTravel meet its customer guarantee better? Explain. b. Another service guarantee offered is, “If your phone call is not answered within 90 seconds, we’ll pay you $10.” Peak arrival rate of calls to BizTravel is during the lunch hour from 12 to 1, and averages one customer every minute. A transaction takes on average 5 minutes to service. The manager decides to schedule 5 agents during this period. Do you expect the BizTravel to have to pay out any money?*

Explanation / Answer

This makes a proper case for queueing theory where in we have to analyze if available counters can manage incoming volumes.

The software developed here will definitely have been worked upon keeping queueing theory and mind and this can definitely help in manging service guarantees as promised.

Mathematical studies would have been conducted based on waiting lines and thus waiting lengths and waiting time would be predicted which will enable company to assign enough staff to the task.

For the second part, without actually looking at mathematical waiting times if we look at it logically, there are 5 agents who can pick up individual queues.

Say we receive a call at 0th minute and ends at 5th minute, as per average service time. So the 1st agent is free by 6th minute and hence there is no calls accumulating.

So company will be able to keep up the promise without paying.

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