KEL153

SUNIL CHOPRA

Quality Wireless (A):

Call Center Performance

“I wonder whether all the changes to our operations have made any difference as to how long
we keep customers on hold before their calls are answered,” wondered Ray Jackson. “There are
some days when we do a lot better than before, and other days when we do worse. I need to
understand what’s going on.”

Jackson was the general manager of the customer service call center for Quality Wireless, a
leading provider of wireless services. The call center, located in Colorado Springs, handled all
customer calls related to service interruptions and billing. Senior management at the head office
had encouraged Jackson’s proposal to implement a variety of changes to improve call center
performance. Jackson now had a month of data on the call center’s performance after the changes
were implemented and was hoping to find real improvement.

The Call Center at Colorado Springs

In 2002 Quality Wireless decided to consolidate its many regional customer service call
centers into three, one of which was located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The desire to cut
costs and improve customer service was the motivating factor behind the consolidation. By the
end of 2005, however, the company felt that improvements in both cost and customer service
were significantly lower than anticipated.

At this point in time, the call center was organized into two groups—one handling service
interruption calls and the other handling billing inquiries. Each group was further divided into
regional teams that handled calls from their assigned regions. The call center had a total of eight
hundred employees who were assigned to specific teams. Employees had flexible work hours and
were scheduled so that the number of customer service representatives (CSRs) matched expected
call volumes. Given the high variability in call volumes, however, customers often spent a long
time on hold before talking to a CSR. Bills were sent out at the end of every month, and these
were typically reviewed by customers at the beginning of the month. As a result, the call volume
for the billing group was very large for the first week of each month. The service interruption
group had no predictable time period when call volumes were unusually large.

The call center tracked a variety of performance metrics, including the average time on hold,
the average time with a CSR, the fraction of callers that waited on hold, and the CSR utilization.
These were tracked on a daily basis and reported in terms of daily averages. Exhibit 1 contains
the details and the frequency distribution of the average daily hold time for the two-year period of

©2006 by the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. This case was prepared by Professor Sunil Chopra. Cases are
developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or
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QUALITY WIRELESS (A) KEL153

2003–2004. Exhibit 2 contains the histogram of the frequency distribution. The average daily
hold time over the two years had an overall average of 99.67 seconds and a standard deviation of
24.24. Based on a survey of customer tolerance, the call center targeted an average daily hold
time of less than 110 seconds.

Near the end of 2004 there were many customer complaints regarding the length of time they
spent on hold when communicating with the call center. Quality Wireless felt it was very
important to improve call center performance in this area. Financial constraints, however, dictated
that the work force size could not be increased when making changes.

Changing the Process to Improve Performance

Jackson put together a task force to suggest changes in call center processes that were likely
to improve performance. The task force immediately focused on the fact that even though the call
center had been consolidated at Colorado Springs, the work force was still divided into regional
groups. Their first recommendation was to organize the work force in such a way that calls from
any region could be answered by all CSRs. This would require some training of the work force
and investment in new call routing technology.

The task force’s other recommendation was to stagger customer bills over the entire month.
The logic was that because a large fraction of the billing calls came within the first week of the
month, this put significant stress on the billing work force and led to long hold times. If bills were
staggered, incoming call volume would be level over the month, thus improving the average
waiting time when customers called.

The task force also suggested other updates in information technology that focused on
quickly retrieving customer information and providing up-to-date information to the CSR. The
task force felt that these improvements would reduce a CSR’s time spent with a customer, thus
increasing the call center’s processing capacity.

The various changes were implemented in the first quarter of 2005 and were in place by the
end of March 2005.

Performance of the New Process

Even though these changes sounded good, Jackson felt that it was essential to be able to
document actual improvement. He collected the average daily hold times for the month of April
2005, as shown in Exhibit 3. The overall average for the month was 79.50 seconds, and this
seemed to indicate improvement. What puzzled Jackson, however, was the fact that the new
process did not consistently do better than the previous process. For example, on April 2, 2005,
the new process averaged a hold time of 116 seconds, which was well above the overall average
of the previous process and exceeded the target of 110 seconds. There were also many days in
2003–2004 when the average hold time was well below April’s minimum average hold time of 48
seconds.

2 KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

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KEL153 QUALITY WIRELESS (A)

Discussion Questions
1. What fraction of the days in 2003–2004 failed to meet the targeted hold time of 110 seconds?
Given that the daily average hold time was normally distributed with a mean of 99.67 and a
standard deviation of 24.24, what fraction of days where the call center failed to meet the
targeted hold time of 110 seconds would you expect?

2. What fraction of the days in April 2005 failed to meet the targeted hold time of 110 seconds?
Given that the daily average hold time after process improvements was normally distributed
with a mean of 79.50 and a standard deviation of 16.86, what fraction of days where the call
center failed to meet the targeted hold time of 110 seconds would you expect?

3. Based on the performance in April 2005, do you think that the performance of the call center
has improved?

KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT 3

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QUALITY WIRELESS (A) KEL153

Exhibit 1: Frequency Distribution of Average Daily Hold Time, 2003–2004

Hold Time Hold Time Hold Time
(in seconds) Frequency (in seconds) Frequency (in seconds) Frequency
39 2 82 8 125 14
40 1 83 16 126 6
41 0 84 8 127 7
42 2 85 9 128 9
43 2 86 8 129 6
44 1 87 9 130 9
45 1 88 10 131 3
46 0 89 10 132 3
47 3 90 11 133 4
48 1 91 10 134 4
49 2 92 15 135 4
50 0 93 10 136 5
51 2 94 18 137 4
52 4 95 13 138 3
53 3 96 10 139 2
54 2 97 3 140 2
55 2 98 14 141 2
56 3 99 11 142 2
57 0 100 10 143 3
58 3 101 11 144 5
59 2 102 11 145 1
60 2 103 10 146 3
61 1 104 10 147 1
62 0 105 18 148 1
63 4 106 10 149 3
64 6 107 13 150 6
65 4 108 8 151 2
66 6 109 11 152 0
67 6 110 11 153 1
68 3 111 8 154 3
69 5 112 10 155 0
70 8 113 6 156 0
71 7 114 5 157 0
72 7 115 8 158 0
73 4 116 14 159 0
74 7 117 12 160 0
75 6 118 11 161 0
76 17 119 12 162 0
77 13 120 5 163 0
78 6 121 5 164 1
79 4 122 7 165 0
80 13 123 8 166 3
81 10 124 7

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KEL153 QUALITY WIRELESS (A)

Exhibit 2: Histogram of Call Center Hold Times, 2003–2004

20

18

16

14

12
Number of Days

10

0
3
7
1
5
9
3
7
1
5
9
3
7
1
5
9
3
39
43
47
51
55
59
63
67
71
75
79
83
87
91
95
99
10
10
11
11
11
12
12
13
13
13
14
14
15
15
15
16
Average Hold Time for Day

KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT 5

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QUALITY WIRELESS (A) KEL153

Exhibit 3: Average Daily Hold Times, April 2005

Average
Hold Time
Date (in seconds)
4/1/2005 87
4/2/2005 116
4/3/2005 57
4/4/2005 82
4/5/2005 76
4/6/2005 73
4/7/2005 56
4/8/2005 92
4/9/2005 76
4/10/2005 55
4/11/2005 83
4/12/2005 107
4/13/2005 87
4/14/2005 63
4/15/2005 87
4/16/2005 83
4/17/2005 99
4/18/2005 73
4/19/2005 102
4/20/2005 62
4/21/2005 83
4/22/2005 82
4/23/2005 103
4/24/2005 48
4/25/2005 72
4/26/2005 73
4/27/2005 62
4/28/2005 96
4/29/2005 63
4/30/2005 87

Average daily hold time for April 2005 = 79.50 seconds

Standard deviation of daily averages for April 2005 = 16.86

6 KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

This document is authorized for use only in PGP 2010 by Prof. Rohit Joshi from August 2010 to February 2011.