BankUSA: Forecasting Help Desk Demand by Day Case Study 1. What are the service

ID: 459587 • Letter: B

Question

BankUSA: Forecasting Help Desk Demand by Day Case Study

1. What are the service management characteristics of the CSR job?

2. Define the mission statement and strategy of the Help Desk. Why is the Help Desk important? Who are its customers?

3. How would you handle the customer affected by the inaccurate stock price in the bank’s trust account system? Would you take a passive or proactive approach? Justify your answer.

4. Using the data on call volume in the accompanying table, how would you forecast short-term demand?

Explanation / Answer

Ans;

1.What are the service management characteristics of the CSR job?

The best way to answer this question is to ask students, especially ones who have worked in a call center. Make sure students realize when they are interacting with a call center such as when getting the cable TV or phone installed, turning on their apartment’s electric and water, reserving a hotel room, airline seat, or concert ticket; and so on.

Typical CSR job characteristics include: service management skills (i.e., simultaneous technical (operational), marketing, and human interactions skills), job is electronically monitored, low pay, stressful, show empathy toward customer problem, patience, sitting all day, supervisors listening in on your customer-service provider conversations, no privacy, and so on. Is it more stressful than most manufacturing jobs? Most students will say yes but point out safety and environment risks in goods-producing industries (risk of accidents, heat, physical lifting and twisting, etc.).

2. Define the mission statement and strategy of the Help Desk contact center? Why is the Help desk important? Who are its customers?

The Help Desk's mission is "to provide accurate and timely resolution of customer problems and inquires for the bank." The Help Desk is the gateway to problem resolution and is an interdisciplinary function since it researches and resolves errors across all functional areas. It is a high profile operation where customer problems must be resolved quickly; otherwise, they end up on top management's desk. Internal and intermediate front room bank employees call the Help Desk for help--simple as that. Hence, the customer is mainly an internal bank employee.

3. How would you handle the customer affected by the inaccurate stock price in the banks trust account system? Passive or pro-active approach? Justify your answer.

Two options exist as follows: (1) If the stock price is in error correct this customers account statement, call them and apologize, and immediately mail a corrected account statement. Otherwise, be passive and wait and see if other customers call the bank and recognize the stock price error, and if they do, correct the problem immediately. (2) Be pro-active and search all customer accounts looking for this stock price error and immediately notify all customers affected by the error, and mail each of them corrected account statements as soon as possible.

What this real bank actually does is briefly described as follows: Call a Priority 1 meeting with the appropriate systems, product support, retail, and backroom support personnel. Correct the problem as soon as possible, notify all front line trust and wealth account advisors, express mail corrected account statements to all intermediate (internal) customers and let them hand deliver the corrected statement to the ultimate customer or mail directly to the customer.

After the error is acknowledged and fixed do a root cause analysis and try to fix the source of the error, if at all possible. Write-up a report summarizing what happened and how it was resolved and how the process was fool proofed. One automated tool used by the bank is software that monitors the variance in stock price and if deemed out-of-control, the stock is investigated.

1.Using the data on Call Volume in the accompanying table, how would you forecast short-term demand?

Given the OM template your students may do some of the following analysis.

Average

389.19

Maximum

522.00

Minimum

251.00

Std Deviation

85.47