Title: What is a confidence interval in layman's terms? - Quora
Headings: What is a confidence interval in layman's terms?
What is a confidence interval in layman's terms?
Anonymous

Content: Customer Service Drain
Situation: Brick & mortar stores like Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, etc. have a difficult time dealing with the practice of “show - rooming” whereby customers come into the store, examine items, leave, and then go online to find a cheaper price where there is less overhead cost. These are “false-customers”. SALES associates spend time with customers who have no intention of buying anything at the store leading to unproductive time spent. Management in one company determined that if less than 15% of salesperson’s 8-hour day is spent with “false customers” then show - rooming while a nuisance, is not a problem. Q. To determine if current show - rooming is really a problem based on the company’s standards, 125 sales associates are randomly selected to measure their service times with false customers. Assume that = 1958 seconds, ẍ (sample mean) = 3661.5, n = 125
Standard error of the mean = 1958/√125 = 175.13
95% confidence interval - 3661.5 (+/-) 1.96 (175.13) = 3661.5 (+/-) 343.25
Conclusion: 15% of a salesperson time was (0.15*3600 = 4320 seconds) but we are 95% confident that salesperson spends between 3318.25 seconds & 4004.75 seconds interacting with “false customers” each 8-hour day thus we can conclude that false customers are not a great enough drain to justify any policy change as the time range calculated is less than the critical time value which is 4320 (3600*8*15%). Sponsored by Best Gadget Advice
25 insanely cool gadgets selling out quickly in 2021.