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AT&T Business Research Project Part 1

TEAM A: Michael Ching, Dion Wigfall, Edwin Strickland, and Stephen Phelan

University of Phoenix

QNT 561

January 3, 2017

AT&T is a communications company that has decades of history behind it, long before the advent of the Internet and mobile devices (AT&T). The name itself is one of the few that has been around since the invention of the telephone, and has then been rebuilt into a corporate juggernaut, handling cell phone services for over 300 million people and now delivering satellite television in the form of DirectTV (AT&T).

This sort of influence and power naturally comes with a variety of problems and responsibilities. For individual stores, there may be a very unbalanced ratio of workers to customers. Each customer must wait for a worker to talk to them in order to purchase something; if that customer waits too long, there is an increased risk of him or her leaving. Having available and attentive workers is crucial to meeting standards in accordance with efficiency and customer satisfaction. A company is only as good as the people it hires, and if there’s not enough employees, it may lead to failure.

Business problem

Due to the limit number of AT&T RSC working causes a change in AT&T customer wait time. With only 5 RSC and 10 or more customers waiting to be seen for various issues, is a problem that has to be addressed. AT&T customer wait time growing out of control due to various reasons. First issue AT&T has is the RSC are not trained on how to handle excessive amounts of customers at peak times of the day with limited RSC. Untrained RSC is a failure on AT&T to develop list of strategies to handle the rise in customers and provide training to RSC on strategies. Second issue I see is observing and communication to awaiting customers, isn’t or possibly not taking place. These are just couple of issue AT&T should be concerned, there many variables that lead up to customers wait times at AT&T.

Wait times in AT&T store are a very important but often overlooked part of the individual AT&T store’s success equation. Stores do not want to lose customers due to long wait times because of the impact to the stores bottom line. The impact of losing customers can be made worst by poor service complaints spread through word of mouth and over social media. “Businesses in the United States lose an estimated $83 billion in sales every year because of poor customer experiences.” ("Why We Wont' Wait", 2013)

On the other hand having a staff too large can impact the profits of the individual store via overhead costs. Finding a balance between staff size and wait times, is the genesis of the following research proposal.

The Independent Variable in this case is the number of retail sales consultants working at a individual AT&T store. As such, the Dependent variable would be the average wait time experienced by each customer within that location. (The number of RSC’s working) causes a change in (wait time) and it isn't possible that (wait time) could cause a change in (the number of RSC’s working). The purposed research question is, “Does the amount of retail sales consultants directly or indirectly effect the amount of time each customer must wait to be helped?”

Team A believes that the amount of RSC’s working will affect the amount of time that people will have to wait before being helped. There are many variables that can affect how long an RSC will take to help a single person. If only five people are working and there are ten customers, then five or more customers will be waiting to be serviced.

Team A roll is to analyze and develop strategies to manage AT&T customer waiting time. Possible strategies AT&T could provide training to retail sales clerks on the front-line to equipped them to prioritize customer’s needs, communicate more effectively and minimize customer wait time issues with limited retail sales clerk. AT&T retail sales clerk can set the expectation by giving customers estimated wait time upfront giving the customer the option to wait or come back at later times. This way customers can eat or taken a walk while waiting to see a retail sales clerk. AT&T can provide more distractions in waiting area so customer minds are off wait times, distractions like brochures, new equipment on display. The last thing AT&T can do is service recovery. Retail sales clerks should be equipped perform service recovery for bad customer service experience. Which can be a simple apology to customer for the inconvenience.

REFERENCES

Home| History| AT&T. (2016, December 27). Retrieved from https://www.corp.att.com/history/.

Why We Wont' Wait. (2013). Retrieved from http://lp.lavi.com/files/Why-We-Wont-Wait-Guide.pdf