A mail- order company has one department for taking customer orders and another for handling com-plaints. Currently, each department has a separate telephone number. Each has 7 telephone lines served by 2 customer service representatives. Calls come into each department at an average rate of 1 per minute.
Each representative takes, on average, 1.5 minutes to serve a customer. Management has proposed merging the two departments and cross training all workers. The projected new department would have 14 telephone lines served by 4 customer service representatives. As process manager, you expect the following:
a. The proportion of callers getting a busy signal will increase decrease be unchanged
b. Average flow time experienced by customers will increase decrease be unchanged