The world of the contact center is in flux, as many communications technologies spaces these days, but how can the enterprise reconcile staying on top of its customer-facing interactions while maintaining operational efficiency? Bay Bridge (News - Alert) Decision Technologies says the answer is long-term planning and forecasting.

While long-term planning seems like a good idea for most human initiatives, there are natural challenges when you’re trying to plan for several departments with hundreds of agents. Contact center managers would rather not wake up each day and not have any idea what is in store for overtime needs or staffing capacities. Jen Dziekan, manager of Training for Bay Bridge recently expounded upon these challenges and what kinds of answers exist for contact centers in this regard in a recent webinar.

Dziekan has moved up the ranks of Bay Bridge’s organization, a company that specializes in contact center strategic planning, and she noted that “Long-term planning and analysis can lower drastic real-time adjustments.” She said that a capacity planning process improves operational efficiency, and focused on the Predict, Staff and Publish phases of a capacity plan. Having these three phases of an operational plan in place will streamline the efforts of any business in lowering its costs and reducing productivity issues.

Creating a prediction plan will help businesses forecast changes in volume and shrinkage. “Creating an optimal staffing plan reduces last minute adjustments needed by the management and operations teams,” said Dziekan. And in the publish phase, best practices such as interactively updating the plan during meetings and preparing common ‘what ifs,’ improves communications within a business overall.

Contact centers should also consider the importance of “what if” analysis. Such analysis allows for risk evaluation – a crucial item for the competitive business. Asking the questions that lead to knowing what risk is associated with the current plan the business has in place will help operations teams identify when issues are occurring and to streamline mitigation execution, Dziekan noted.

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