CASE : COMPUTER CLUB WAREHOUSE - PART 1

1. COMPANY : Computer Club Warehouse (CCW) sells various

computer products at bargain prices by taking telephone orders, fax orders and through its website
directly from the customers. Its products include desktop and laptop computers, peripherals,
hardware accessories, supplies, software, games and, computer related furniture. CCW mails
catalogues to its customers and numerous target customers several times every year and, publishes
mini-catalogues in computer magazines. These catalogues prominently display 800 toll-free
telephone numbers to call to place an order. These calls come into the company’s call center.

2. CCW CALL CENTER : Call Center works round the clock for three hundred
sixty five days. Their sole job is to take and process customer orders over the telephone. A second,
much smaller call center uses another 800 number for caller making inquiries or reporting problems.
However, we will deal with the operations of the main call center.

New Agents receive a week’s training before beginning work. Training emphasizes how to efficiently
and courteously process an order. An Agent is expected not to average more than five minutes per
call. Records are kept and an Agent who does not meet this target by the end of the probationary
period will not be retained. Although the Agents are well paid, the tedium and time pressure
associated with the job leads to a high turnover rate.

A large number of telephone trunks are provided for incoming calls. If an Agent is not free when the
call arrives, it is placed on hold with a recorded message and background music. If all the trunks are
in use, referred to as saturation, an incoming call receives a busy signal instead.

Although some customers who get a busy signal or who hang up after being on-hold for too long, will
try again later until they get through, many do not. Therefore, it is very important to have enough
Agents on duty to minimize these problems. On the other hand, because of high labour cost for the
Agents, CCW tries to avoid having so many Agents on duty that they have significant idle time.

Consequently, obtaining forecasts of the demand for the Agent is crucial to the company

3. CALL CENTER MANAGER, LYDIA WIEGERT : As the topper in her graduation from a b-
school, Lydia was wooed by several top companies before choosing CCW. Extremely bright and hard
driving, she is being groomed to enter top management at CCW in the coming years. When she was
hired a little over three years ago, she was assigned to her current position in order to learn the
business from the ground up. The call center is considered to be the nerve center of the entire CCW
operation.
 Before Lydia's arrival, the company had suffered from serious management problems with the call
center. Orders were not being processed efficiently. A few were even misdirected. Staffing levels
never seemed to be right. Management directives to adjust the levels kept over compensating in the
opposite direction. Data needed to get a handle on the staffing level problem hadn't been kept.
Morale was low.

All that changed when Lydia arrived. One of her first moves was to install procedures for gathering
the data needed to make decisions on staffing levels. The key data included a detailed record of call
volume and how much of the volume was being handled by each agent. Efficiency improved
substantially. Despite running a tight ship, Lydia took great pains to praise and reward good work.
Morale increased dramatically.

Although gratified by the great improvement in the operation of the call center, Lydia still has one
major frustration. At the end of each quarter, when she knows how many agents are not being
retained at the end of their probationary period, she makes a decision on how many new agents to
hire to go through the next training session; held at the beginning of each quarter. She has developed
an excellent procedure for estimating the staffing level needed to cover any particular call volume.
However, each time she has used this procedure to set the staffing level for the upcoming quarter,
based on her forecast of the call volume, it usually turned out to be considered off. Therefore, she
still isn't getting the right staffing levels.

Lydia has concluded that her next project should be to develop a better forecasting method to replace
the current one.

4. LYDIA’S CURRENT FORECASTING METHOD : Thanks to her data-gathering procedures

installed shortly after her arrival, reliable data on call volume are now available for the past three
years. Data on accompanying EXCEL SHEET 01 show the average number of calls received per day
in each of the quarters of these years. When she first joined CCW, the president told her about the
”25 PERCENT RULE” that the company traditionally used to forecast call volume.

a. What is the Time Bucket in this case?

b. Describe the character of the data.
c. What is “Percentage Rule” or, “Naïve Method”?
d. What is the Forecast for First Quarter of January 2018?
e. What is the Forecasting Error?
f. Is 25% Rule true for CCW?