My-law. com is a recent start-up trying to cater to customers in search of legal services who are intimidated by the idea of talking to a lawyer or simply too lazy for entering a law office. Unlike traditional law firms, My-law. com allows for extensive interaction between lawyers and their customers via telephone and the internet. This process is used in the upfront part of the customer interaction, largely consisting of answering some basic customer questions prior to entering a formal relationship. In order to allow customers to interact with the firm's lawyers, customers are encouraged to send emails to my- lawyeraMy-law. com. From there, the incoming emails are distributed to the lawyer who is currently "on call". Given the broad skills of the lawyers, each lawyer can respond to each incoming request. Emails arrive from 8am to 6pm at a rate of 10 emails per hour (coefficient of variation for the arrivals is I). At each moment in time, there is exactly one lawyer "on call", i. e. sitting at his/her desk, waiting for incoming emails. It takes the lawyer, on average, 5 minutes to write the response email. The standard deviation of this is 4 minutes. a-6 minutes; p 5, CV 4/5 0.8 1.What is the average time a customer has to wait for the response to her email, ignoring any transmission times?
a. 2 Minutes
b. 2.5 Minutes
c. 18 Minutes
d. 20.5 Minutes
e. 25.5
f. None of the above
2. How many emails will a lawyer have received at the end of a 10 hour day?
a. 10
b. 12
c. 100
d. 120
e. None of the above
3. While not responding to emails, the lawyer on call is encouraged to actively pursue cases that potentially could lead to large settlements. How much time over a 10h day can a my-law. com lawyer dedicate to this activity?
a. 600 minutes
b. 120 minutes
c. 100 minutes
d. 80 minutes
e. None of the above
4. To increase the responsiveness of the firm, the board of my- law. com proposes a new operating policy. Under the new policy, the response would be highly standardized, reducing the standard deviation for writing the response em to0.5 minutes. The average writing time would remain unchanged. How would the amount of time a lawyer can dedicate to the search for large settlement cases change with this new operating policy?
a. It would go up
b. It would go down
c. It would remain unchanged
d. Cannot be determined as it depends on the variability
5. What is the average time a customer has to wait for the response to her email with the new operating policy?
a. 5.05 minutes
b. 10.225 minutes
c. 12.625 minutes
d. 14.135 minutes
e. 17.625
f. None of the above
In order to allow customers to receive advice over the telephone, my-lawyer. com plans to hire a number of legal assistants to staff a call-center. The number of calls coming in between 8am and 6pm is estimated to be 5 calls per hour (coefficient of variation for the inter-arrival time is 1). Each call is expected to take 20 minutes (with a standard deviation of 20 minutes).
6. What would be the utilization of the call center staff with two legal assistants?
a. 55%
b. 80.25%
c. 88%
d. Cannot be determined
e. None of the above
7. What is the minimum number of legal assistants in the call center that would allow to have an average waiting time of 10 minutes or less before talking to a legal assistant?
a. 1
b. 2
c. 3
d. 4
e. none of the above