Fill This Form To Receive Instant Help
Fill This Form To Receive Instant Help
Homework answers / question archive / Recently, the manager at Micron conducted a study of the time customers spent on hold waiting for a Micron representative to become available
Recently, the manager at Micron conducted a study of the time customers spent on hold waiting for a Micron representative to become available. The data showed that the distribution of time spent on hold is approximately normally distributed, with a mean of 18 minutes and a standard deviation of 4 minutes.
Question: The service manager wants to make sure that no one waits longer than 18 minutes. Determine the standard deviation that would be required to meet this goal?
A normal distribution is symmetrical around the mean. How spread out it is depends on the standard deviation (if the standard deviation is small, the distribution will be tall and skinny, and if it is large, the distribution will be short and wide). No matter what the standard deviation, the curve will extend in both directions from the mean.
Because the mean is 18, the distribution of time spent on hold will include values above and below 18. The only way to ensure that there are no values above 18 is to have a standard deviation of 0. In that case, every single call would be 18 minutes, no more and no less.
This isn't realistic in real life. What you would really want to do in this situation is either make the standard deviation as low as possible, or lower the mean.
