An Analysis of Time Usage in Bell System Business Offices

The everyday contact with customers of the Bell System is carried out in approximately 2100 business offices. The assessment of such a large number of offices makes the continued improvement oj formal office measurement schemes attractive. This paper describes an analysis of models for time usage in Bell System business offices. In addition, it was hoped that these models would be potentially useful for interoffice comparisons. A model for single offices is described first. This is followed by the development of a multioffice model which is constructed in such a way that it has good statistical characteristics and attempts to make the office comparisons as fair as possible. The inputs to the multioffice model are: (i) the gross time used by each business office, (ii) the number of contacts that each office had with business and residence customers, (Hi) the number of accounts carried by each office, and (iv) certain characteristics which were judged to reflect the nature of the exogenous demand put on the office, for example, percent of business main telephones.