Background: a bi-weekly meeting with the Customer Service team, who reports on weekly call and email volumes directly attributed to our Fraud team. This week, the Customer Service Manager is reporting a 5x increase in call and email volume, which her team is unable to sustain. Many sellers are waiting up to 3 hours to reach someone on the phone, and up to 48 hours to receive a response to their email. It is unclear what factors are causing the increase in volumes. The Customer Service Manager is only able to provide quotes from a few recent phone calls:

"The customer has not received my deposit in over a week. The bank is holding customers' money and the customer never received any kind of notification informing them. When will customers receive their money?"

"Where is customers money? customers, Usually get deposits every evening but didn't receive one last night. customers checked spam and my inbox to see if anything was sent, but nothing was there."

"customer checked dashboard to see they needed to anything more to receive their money, but there it was, just sitting there. What's happening?"

Scenario: The above situation with nothing more than the information provided by the Manager. Drawing from similar experiences, please answer the following questions:

a. Without any additional data, what will be initially hypothesize to be the root cause of the volume increase? Note more than one hypothesis is allowed.

b. In order to identify the root cause (s) of the problem, what are some questions that would ask that need answering? What teams do you engage to help answer these questions? Note: the CS team does not have any additional data for you other than the quotes provided.

c. Assume that the root cause has been successfully identified, and the root cause of the problem and it will be fixed in 2 weeks' time. What creative recommendations can be useful to address the short-term backlog of calls and emails until a fix is deployed?