Bat Case Report
Executive Summary
BAT is a technology that sells financial software to individuals and organizations. BAT’s success had attracted a number of competitors. BAT differentiated itself by committing to free tech support for the life of the product. BAT started its call center operations in 1987 with 6 technicians which grew to over a 100 technicians by 2002. However, the call center has been under pressure in terms of long waiting times for customers. Such poor service was beginning to take its toll on the company’s reputation.
We recommend that BAT should implement the Fast Track proposal in order to improve customer service and the company’s bottom line. We understand that free technical support is BAT’s value proposition and central to its business model, but we will show with our analysis why this is the best approach to follow. Qualitatively, 1. BAT will still maintain free support with Fast Track. Fast track will only create market segmentation. Customers on top of the market pyramid who are readily willing to pay can be tapped. 2. Fast Track will convert the call center from a cost center into a profit center. With the revenue being generated out of Fast Track calls, BAT can staff the call center with more technicians to improve service levels for standard callers.
Current Situation
BOP Team 1 is consists of 8 customer service technicians and the arrival rate of customers is 22.5 customers/hour. The average time to deal with one customer is 18.2 minutes. Therefore, the service rate capacity per technician is 3.2967 customers/hour. After running the Steady-State, Infinite Capacity Queues model, the average waiting time of customers is 0.14979 hour, which equals to about 9 minutes and there will be in average 3.37 customers waiting in the queue. Please refer to Appendix 1 for details.
Since the arrival rate and the service capacity rate cannot be shortened, increasing number of technician is the only way to shorten the average waiting time down
BAT is a technology that sells financial software to individuals and organizations. BAT’s success had attracted a number of competitors. BAT differentiated itself by committing to free tech support for the life of the product. BAT started its call center operations in 1987 with 6 technicians which grew to over a 100 technicians by 2002. However, the call center has been under pressure in terms of long waiting times for customers. Such poor service was beginning to take its toll on the company’s reputation.
We recommend that BAT should implement the Fast Track proposal in order to improve customer service and the company’s bottom line. We understand that free technical support is BAT’s value proposition and central to its business model, but we will show with our analysis why this is the best approach to follow. Qualitatively, 1. BAT will still maintain free support with Fast Track. Fast track will only create market segmentation. Customers on top of the market pyramid who are readily willing to pay can be tapped. 2. Fast Track will convert the call center from a cost center into a profit center. With the revenue being generated out of Fast Track calls, BAT can staff the call center with more technicians to improve service levels for standard callers.
Current Situation
BOP Team 1 is consists of 8 customer service technicians and the arrival rate of customers is 22.5 customers/hour. The average time to deal with one customer is 18.2 minutes. Therefore, the service rate capacity per technician is 3.2967 customers/hour. After running the Steady-State, Infinite Capacity Queues model, the average waiting time of customers is 0.14979 hour, which equals to about 9 minutes and there will be in average 3.37 customers waiting in the queue. Please refer to Appendix 1 for details.
Since the arrival rate and the service capacity rate cannot be shortened, increasing number of technician is the only way to shorten the average waiting time down