Because of new market promotions and sales growth, the online customer service center described in Problem 3 has started getting approximately 50,000 e-mails every day. The service center currently has 100 employees. The e-mails can be classified in two categories: routine inquiries and custom requests. Employees can answer the routine inquiries by picking prespecified answers from the database. This process takes only 30 seconds. The custom requests, on the other hand, require drafting specific responses and take approximately 2.5 minutes.
a. Calculate the takt time for both routine and custom inquiries.
b. Assuming that 75 percent of all requests are routine, calculate the overall takt time for the customer service center.