A mail order company has one department taking customer orders and the other handling customer complaints. Currently each department has a separate telephone number. Each department has 7 Watts lines served by two customer service representatives. Calls come into each department at the rate of 1 per minute. Each customer service representative takes on average 1.5 minutes to serve a customer. A proposal has been put forward to merge the to departments and cross train the workers. The new department would, as a result, have 14 watts lines served by four customer service representatives. As the operations manager, you know that
(a) The proportion of callers getting a busy signal will
(i) Increase
(ii) Decrease
(iii) Remained unchanged.
(b) The average utilization of customer service representatives will
(i) Increase
(ii) Decrease
(iii) Remained unchanged

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The Answer is (a) The proportion of callers getting a busy signal will decrease. Callers will now get a busy signal only if there are 14 people in the process. This is equivalent to having 7 people in each of the two previous processes. In the previous setup, some callers would get a busy signal if either of the two processes had 7 people.
(b) The average utilization of customer service representatives will increase since more customers now enter the process and are served.

A Mail Order Company Has One Department Taking Customer Orders