You have now conducted your interview with the Director of Sales at AdviseInvest. The substance of what you learned is included below. Take this information and write a business problem statement for the AdviseInvest project, keeping in mind that your audience for this document is the Director of Sales as the primary stakeholder, and that your goal is to get the project approved.

The available information is somewhat sparse, which will often be the case. Do your best to write a brief problem statement using the information you have. (In this context "brief" means 2 or 3 paragraphs.

AdviseInvest Business Case

AdviseInvest is a venture-backed startup whose mission is to provide ordinary people with access to affordable financial advice. Potential AdviseInvest customers arrive at the AdviseInvest web site and fill out a customer profile with information about their goals and background. They then schedule a call with a sales representative for a particular one-hour window. AdviseInvest has four sales reps on staff during each particular one-hour window. Each sales rep is assigned two customers. The problem is that about 50% of the customers who schedule a call do not answer. Not only does this leave sales reps underutilized, it does so unevenly. For example, it is possible that one sales rep will not get to do any sales calls during that hour, whereas another will be busy the entire hour with two calls. The Director of Sales has approached a small team of analysts (inside the company but not in Sales) asking for a solution to the problem.

One approach to solving the problem posed by the Director of Sales is to use predictive analytics models to identify customers who would be more likely to answer the call scheduled with the sales reps and prescriptive analytics models to decide how to allocate these customers to sales representatives.

Interview

Q. Could you tell us more about how calls are scheduled and routed? A. A potential customer fills out a profile on the website, and tries to schedule an appointment with a sales associate. Up to eight customers are allowed to sign up for a onehour time slot. I have four sales associates on staff for each time slot, and they go down the list of customers in the order in which customers have signed up.

Q. Do you keep track of the length of time between when a customer schedules an appointment and the date of the actual appointment? A. I am not sure if we record this information but my impression is that it takes about three days on average.

Q. Do you staff sales associates differently during different times of the day? A. No, four associates are available for all time slots.

Q. Who has final say on this project? A. We are a small company. I report directly to our CEO, and we are both interested in solving this problem.

Q. What type of data do you have available? A. I will need to check with our IT staff. What type of data do you think you need? Your reply (fortunately you had this list already drawn up!): demographic information on each customer, such as age, salary, amount of credit debt, etc.; the source of the lead (if it came through another website); information about the time of the customer appointment and the length of time between filling out the profile and the appointment; information about whether the customer picked up the call; information about which product (if any) the customer bought when he or she picked up the call. Note: the Director of Sales got back to you right away with a list of data elements available for the project:

• Answered. A variable indicating whether the customer answered the scheduled call.
• Customer demographics and financial information. income, age, sex, job type, number of dependents, home owner, recent car purchase, checking account transactions, saving account balance, number of accounts.
• Mobile phone. Indicator for whether the call back number is a mobile phone.
• Product. The product purchased if answered.

Q. Do you have a sense for the type of customer who is more likely to answer the call? A. I am afraid that currently we have no idea.

Q. If you are concerned with keeping staff busy, why do you not find some other tasks for them to do when a customer does not pick up the call? (Incidentally, this is not a great question. It is condescending and creates distance between the interviewer and the interviewee. A better way to phrase the question may be: Q. What does a sales associate do if a customer does not pick up the call?) A. Currently, nothing. We ask the sales associate to move to the next customer who is signed up for that time slot, and if we run out of customer names, the sales associate waits until the next hours list of customers become available.

Q. What is the timeline for when the project should be finished? A. 6 months.

Q. Have you tried any method for improving the allocation of sales associate time? A. No. We know it is a problem that needs to be solved but have not yet done anything about it.

Q. What would you consider a successful result for this project? A. We would like to see this project result in increases of the average time that sales associates spend with customers.

From this information formulate a well written Business Problem Statement.

Business problem statement rubric

Business problem statement rubric

Criteria Ratings Pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Business problem Has the writer included a straightforward formulation of the business problem? Is that formulation accurate? Does it include crucial details or is to too general to be genuinely illuminating? Is the problem easy to find in the document? (It is not a bad idea to lead off the business problem statement with a formulation of the problem.) 2 pts Excellent 1.5 pts Good 1 pts Fair 0 pts Missing 2 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Analytics approach What is the general character of the analytics approach that the writer is proposing for solving the problem? Will the approach be unsupervised or supervised, regression or classification or something else? Is the objective prediction or description? Is there a target variable? (If so, what is it?) What variables are available in the data as predictors? 2 pts Excellent 1.5 pts Good 1 pts Fair 0 pts Missing 2 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Benefit of a solution How will the business benefit from a solution? 1 pts Excellent 0.75 pts Good 0.5 pts Fair 0 pts Missing 1 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Success metrics How will stakeholders judge whether the project was a success? 1 pts Excellent 0.75 pts Good 0.5 pts Fair 0 pts Missing 1 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Scope What will be delivered and what will be out of scope? What might be added later? 1 pts Excellent 0.75 pts Good 0.5 pts Fair 0 pts Missing 1 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Details Who is going to execute the project? When will the project be finished? Are there important project milestones? 1 pts Excellent 0.75 pts Good 0.5 pts Fair 0 pts Missing 1 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Accurate Use of Terms/Concepts Has the writer used business analytic terms and concepts accurately --such as supervised and unsupervised learning, regression, classification, target variable, predictors, segmentation, etc.? 1 pts Excellent 0.75 pts Good 0.5 pts Fair 0.25 pts Poor 1 pts This criterion is linked to a Learning Outcome Quality of Writing Is the business problem statement professionally written? There should be no spelling errors or formatting problems. Sentences should be clear and easy to understand. 1 pts Excellent 0.75 pts Good 0.5 pts Fair 0.25 pts Poor 1 pts