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Case 3.

3: Staffing a Call Center


As presented by Matthew Odom
For Dr. Samaddar
In regards to MSA 8100
Due March 23, 2015

Business Framing
Californias Childrens Hospital (CCH) is segmented such that numerous complaints
have been reported regarding the appointment and registration process. Their
complaints include lack of contact information regarding the clinic and department
of interest; as well as, there is no standard referral process in place. Patients visit
their primary care provider, and when given a referral, the responsibility of
scheduling and contacting the appropriate clinic is left in the hands of the patient.
In an effort to establish accountability within the hospital, and effectively taking
the responsibility out of the patients hands, CCH has hired Creative Chaos
Consultants (CCC) to delineate and optimize a new, centralized call center.

Analytics Framing
Subject to the constraint, approximately twenty percent of patients are Spanishspeaking only. CCH will need to hire full time, Spanish-speaking only operators to
tailor to these patients. Further, after surveying each of the hospitals
departments, CCC will formulate a service that meets the expected number of calls
per hour for every two hour shift. Finally, note that full time employee must break
for paperwork after each two hour, phone shift and is only paid by CCH for their
time on the phone. That is, for example, if a full time employee starts work during
shift 1, he or she will work for two hours, then break for two hours of paperwork,
etc.: meaning that, for four phones of phone time, there will be four hours of
paperwork done during a full shift, and CCH will only compensate them for four
hours of phone time. Paperwork is paid through another company.

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Methodology
To approach this problem, and in order to maximize the expectations from CCH,
CCC will want to minimize the cost of CCHs Salary Expense by deciding amongst
twelve key variables.

Defining Decision Variables


1. : the number of full time, English-speaking employees starting at shift

= 1,2,3,4,5

2. : the number of full time, Spanish-speaking employees starting at shift

= 1,2,3,4,5

3. 5 : the number of part time employees starting their work during shift 5
4. 6 : the number of part time employees starting their work during shift 6.

Refining the Business Problem

Let us start with the breakdown of the expected number of calls per hour for each
shift. After meticulous surveying of each department within CCH, CCC has
adjusted this number to account for the discrepancy of patients calling multiple
departments before reaching their desired department. Further, expectations were
altered to account for the missed calls since inception of the surveying task. As you
can see from the chart above, further inspection is necessary to evaluate which calls
are expected to come from Spanish-speaking only customers. Breaking the average
number of calls (per hour) into a twenty percent subset will account for the Spanishspeaking patients.

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Now, given the number of English and Spanish-speaking calls for each hour, we can
break down the number of operators required to answer those phone calls. Note
that, on average, an employee will answer six phone calls per hour. Given this
notion, the chart above references the expected number of operators needed for each
shift.

Objective Function
Objectively, now that we have considered the number of operators required, we can
write a function that utilizes these resources and minimizes the cost of CCHs
Salary Expense:
. .
401 + 401 + 402 + 402 + 403 + 403 + 444 + 444 + 445 + 445 + 445 + 486 .
The coefficients preceding our resources represent the cost of those resources.
Every employee, regardless of full time or part time status, is paid $10/hour if hours
worked are before 5 PM. Anything after 5 PM, hours worked are paid $12/hour.
Therefore, for example, given 1, this full time, English-speaking operator will start
work during shift one, work for two hours ($20), and return two hours later during
shift 3 for another two hours (plus $20 equals $40) of work.

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Constraints
Finally, now that we have a mindset targeted towards an objective, we can solve for
an optimal minimum solution subject to the constraints given for each shifts
required number of operators.

Bear with me for just a moment and disregard the Used column as this reflects
specifics regarding the optimal solution. Instead, pay mind to the Constraints and
Minimum columns. Here to the left, we can easily see how each employee rotates
their shifts every two hours depending on when he or she started their shift. In
addition, on the right, we can easily see how our expectations of hourly operators
line up with when our employees start their shift. For example, the first shift
requires at least six English-speaking operators, and at least two Spanish-speaking
operators.

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Solver Solution

Setting the objective to minimize the Salary Expense, the optimal solution for CCH
yields a daily cost of $, . for its Salary Expense. The Count column specifies
how many of each employee (Variable) to bring in each hour.

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Condition (d): What if we can only find one full time English-speaking operator to begin
work at 1 PM?
In an effort to stay cost effective, CCH can only find one full time English-speaking
operator to begin work at 1 PM. In our model, this person would be denoted as 4.
Looking at the optimal solution, this problem is not warranted. Considering that
full time employees work in two hour rotations, most full time English-speaking
employees will need to come in during shift 2. We only need one other to begin work
at 1 PM.

Condition (e) & (f): What if all operators are bilingual? How is the model affected?

By allowing operators to be multi-lingual, we must approach this problem a little


more simplistically. First, there is no need to differentiate between English or
Spanish speaking callers. Each operator, again, answers on average six calls per
hour. This meaningfully changes the number of operators needed to answer all the

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calls each day: from 40 to 37. In addition, the optimal solution which minimizes
Salary Expense for CCH drops by $128.00 per day: from $1,640.00 to $1,512.00.

Condition (g): What is the total salary increase that CCH can pay bilingual employees
over monolingual employees?
As long as the spread between full time and part time employees does not exceed an
increase of 8.47%, all other factors will be equal.

Outline Summary
These are two direct, very discreet ways of looking at this situation. It is my
personal opinion that I believe that neither is an optimal solution to this problem. I
believe that an optimal solution will need to combine aspects of both in order to
effectively work for CCH. For example, there will be poor communication between
operators if each operator only speaks one language. Further, it will be somewhat
difficult to find 37 fluently bilingual operators. Having a standard amongst all
operators in terms of language is a good place to start; however, catering to only
20% of your business is not a long-term, profitable outlook. There will need to be a
mix of both solutions in order to optimally apply the call center to the hospitals
problem.

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