Two recent alumni started recently started Move, Breath, Sport, Cycle, also known as MBC, in Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Their business model had two pillars:

1. Selling e-Bikes: e-Bikes are bicycles with a rechargeable electro engine to support the cyclist and reduce the effort needed to ride. E-bikes are increasingly popular globally, especially for their added convenience, and potential to facilitate less well-trained persons to travel by bicycle, in an environmentally friendly manner. MBC sells proprietary e-Bikes in a price range from 7000 to 10000 SAR. Standard models are discounted significantly in the webshop, which accounts for 60% of the sales. MBC doesnt offer discounts in the shop or experience center.
2. Through its proprietary software and a set of matching apps, MBC hosted a customer community. The community allowed customers to meet, track and communicate their activity, organize subgroups, rankings, exchange information on cycling routes, et cetera.

MBC launched quite successfully and was scaling up before they knew it. Unfortunately, both the production facility, delivery, and the community technologies were not without faults. This resulted in customers calling with questions about delivery issue and defects on the bikes, and likewise with questions about the web shop and community services. The incoming calls placed a huge burden on the store staff, and at one point were estimated to result in 40% lost store sales. Customers were simply walking out because the wait was too longand posting their experiences online.

In response MBC set up a small call center, initially equipped with one person. As a result, store sales and productivity recovered, and MBC also found much more time to handle the incoming calls, which in turn positively improved web shop sales. While this brought MBC back on the scale up pathway, it meant that the number of incoming calls kicked up after a while, and that a next waiting line emerged, now in the call center. To restore credibility and reputation, the founders of MBC had agreed on the customer service promise of answering 95% of the incoming calls within half a minute (30 seconds).

While basic, the Call Center Information System Analytics report provided the information below regarding last week. Looking at the report, the founders became somewhat skeptical of the analytics. How could it be that with an average interarrival time of 60 seconds, and an average service time of 40 seconds, more than one third of customers needed to wait more than 30 seconds? It sounded like 50% overcapacity, not like under capacity. They asked the Service Excellence Team of MBC to develop a simulation model and verify the results.

1. Average Number of Incoming Calls per Minute: 1.00
2. Mean Call Handling Time (in seconds): 40
3. Variance in Call Handling Time (in seconds) 15
4. Arrival Process Poisson
5. Distribution of Call Duration Lognormal
6. Percentage of customers with Waiting time 60 seconds 38.8