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 soft-ware 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?*