Question

A Customer Telephone Center receives 1,200 calls in a 24-hour period. Of these calls, 75% occur between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., and calls are evenly distributed during this time. If each person handles 10 calls an hour, how many people are needed to handle calls during these hours

Answer 1

Divide Total time into two Time Periods. A regular Demand and a High Demand Time Period. Since 75% of the 1,200 calls occur between 9:30 am and 3:30 pm. We multiply .75 x 1,200 to get 900. We get an average of 900 calls every day between the hours of 9:30 am and 3:30 pm – Our net time for this time period is 6 hours.

Therefore, 6 Hours/900 becomes our quotient

Again, since the denominator is larger we invert it to 900 calls/6 Hours

To get a demand of 150 calls per hour.

We need to be able to handle 150 calls per hour.

So how Many Call Representatives are needed?

Again, our historical data tells us that each person can handle 10 calls an hour.

Therefore 150 calls per hour /10 Minutes = 15 Customer Service Representatives are needed during Peak Time!

Now, Subtract the Peak Hours from the 21 Hours Net Time Per day, gives us 15 Non-Peak hours we have to staff.