Call Center Management Feature Article

June 09, 2011

Three Ways to Improve Call Center Forecasting

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

No, accurate call center forecasting isn’t something that, gee whiz, it’d be nice to have if we can, but if we can’t, oh well, we’ll just make do with what we have.

Accurate forecasting is critical to successfully managing your workforce. So say [http://blog.monetsoftware.com/2011/01/importance-of-accurate-call-center.html] officials of Monet Software, who note -- correctly -- that in order to meet call demand without under-staffing or over-staffing, “you need methods that precisely predicts how many agents are needed to handle the center's contact volume.”

Yes yes, we know, this is... tricky. Monet officials themselves point to a DMG report issued in 2010, where survey participants listed five forecasting challenges, if you’ve ever taken a serious stab at forecating you’ll nod along and be able to contribute a couple more:

There’s the need to forecast for multiple skill sets, changing business needs negating usefulness of historical volume data, call center volume driven by external events, not controlled by the company -- or the volume being seasonal and varying greatly, or volume patterns changing frequently, making projections difficult.

Hey, we hear you. Monet hears you. So they have some tips and best practices that might help you, and we quote:

Develop "what if" scenarios to explore how a change in call volume or service level goals during a specific day or week would affect your center.

Create regular intra-day forecast updates throughout the day, and calculate a new forecast based on what has already occurred to establish trends that will help you in future decisions.

Forecast and schedule based on response time and "urgency” of the various channels, such as calls, emails and chat.

Earlier this year TMC’s (News - Alert) Susan J. Campbell wrote that Monet Software blog, the company examined the task of call center scheduling and how call center managers might best approach it to deliver the best results.

An important focus in this piece was not so much on the performance of the center, but on the value of its agents. Call center managers know they need to be able to keep their top talent and that begins with proper call center scheduling.

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