Case MB-0901
This case was prepared by Mike Bendixen, Professor of Research Methods and Decision Sciences at the H. Wayne Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship, Nova Southeastern University. It is intended as a basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. The numbers in the case are real but the characters and the organization are disguised. Copyright Š 2009, Nova Southeastern University. June 27, 2009.Quality Scores at ABAZ
Jacques Viljoen pondered the spreadsheet of quality scores that he had just prepared. He wondered exactly how he should go about determining whether control charts could be used to monitor quality on an ongoing basis. He seemed to remember from his MBA lectures that one of the assumptions underlying control charts was that the data had to be normally distributed.
Jacques had recently completed his MBA and his role as business analyst at Allied Bank of Azania (ABAZ) was his first job since graduation. ABAZ is a large retail bank and operates a 1,000 seat inbound call center to handle customer queries. Jacques selected a random sample of five calls for each customer service representative (CSR) each month for quality assessment. Each of these calls was randomly assigned to a quality controller for assessment. The quality was determined according to a set of norms determined by the management of the bank and a score out of 100 assigned. These scores were used as a key metric to monitor CSRs performance and factored into their quarterly bonus.
Jacques had been asked by his supervisor, Peace Molefe, to explore the possibility of using control charts to monitor the quality scores of each CSR. In order to do this, he had randomly selected the quality scores for five CSRs over the past year (see attached spreadsheet). Peace was expecting a quick answer and had asked him to e-mail her a brief report while she was away at a conference over the next few days. Jacques…