Delivering Excellent Service and Managing Call Centers

1. Consider your own organization and the "Delivering Excellent Service" reading. Which lessons does your organization focus on in delivering good service to your customers? How successful is your organization in delivering good service?

1. What are the key performance measures in managing service lines in a call center context? What are the main challenges in managing service lines?

1. What are the core drivers for companies to outsource their call centers overseas? What benefits do they get from outsourcing and what are the main risks?

1. The manager of call center in Manilla dealing with insurance claims from the United States is trying to determine how many service agents he needs to have on duty to answer incoming calls during the busiest part of the day. The service times for calls are exponentially distributed with a mean service time of four minutes. Telephone calls to the insurance claims department follow a Poisson distribution and average the following number during the busy hours of a typical day:
   1. What is the minimum number of agents that would be needed during each hour to have the utilization less than one?

Time of Day	Number of Calls
7:00PM - 8:00PM	54
8:00PM - 9:00PM	71
9:00PM - 10:00PM	100
10:00PM - 11:00PM	122
11:00PM - Midnight	114
Midnight to 1:00am	68

1. What is the minimum number of agents that would be needed to assure that the average waiting time is less than 5 minutes? 2 minutes?