Applied case · Operations · about 60 minutes
Staffing the contact centre
Use hourly call data to model arrivals as Poisson, plan staffing to a demand quantile rather than the average, and connect waiting times to abandoned calls.
The brief
Brightwell Water Services (a fictional utility) runs a customer contact centre open 08:00–21:00. Last quarter, 14.4% of callers hung up before reaching an agent. Scenario assumption: the utility's (fictional) service standard asks it to keep abandonment below 5%; this figure is part of the exercise, not a real regulation. The operations director has asked for a staffing plan for the busiest hours, starting with Sunday 11:00–11:59, the peak of the week.
The workforce planner currently staffs each hour from the average number of calls. Your job is to:
- check the data and understand how arrivals behave;
- turn the arrival pattern into a staffing number that copes with busy hours, not just average ones;
- show the link between waiting and abandoning, without over-claiming;
- recommend a plan the director can defend.
The data. call_center has one row per hour of operation for 90 days (2024-01-07 to 2024-04-05): calls offered, answered and abandoned, agents logged in, average handle time and average wait. It is synthetic — generated to behave like a real contact centre, but describing no real organisation.
Stakeholders. The operations director (owns the service standard), the workforce planner (builds rosters), and finance (pays for each extra agent-hour).
Dataset
Contact-centre hourly calls
1,170 rows · one row = one hour of one day · synthetic data
| Date | Weekday | Hour (hour) | Agents on shift (agents) | Calls offered (calls) | Calls answered (calls) | Calls abandoned (calls) | Average handle time (minutes) | Average wait (seconds) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-01-07 | Sunday | 8 | 2 | 11 | 11 | 0 | 4.8 | 48.3 |
| 2024-01-07 | Sunday | 9 | 3 | 16 | 14 | 2 | 6.2 | 81.2 |
| 2024-01-07 | Sunday | 10 | 4 | 38 | 36 | 2 | 5.2 | 186 |
| 2024-01-07 | Sunday | 11 | 7 | 65 | 58 | 7 | 5 | 103.9 |
| 2024-01-07 | Sunday | 12 | 6 | 59 | 58 | 1 | 4.9 | 92 |
| 2024-01-07 | Sunday | 13 | 3 | 20 | 19 | 1 | 6.1 | 35.6 |
Included with a Formula Quest membership
This case has 4 stages and 9 graded tasks, ending with a written report.
View Formula Quest memberships