Forecasting the Future in Call Center Workforce Management? Sure Would Be Nice

If you’re trying to manage a call center workforce, we don’t need to tell you that accurate forecasting is critical to achieving the results you can. It’s not like understaffing or overstaffing are really all that different from each other in the long run, both stink.

A good recent blog post from Monet Software discusses this issue, pointing out that to avoid the twin bugaboos of under- and overstaffing, “you need methods that precisely predicts how many agents are needed to handle the center's contact volume.”

And to do that, here’s Madame Sosostris with her crystal ball. Yes, it’s a challenge. Hey if you could predict the future you’d be lying on a beach somewhere with a million bucks in the bank, right? What do they expect?

The Monet post mentions a DMG report in 2010 where survey participants listed what they saw as five forecasting challenges, stop us if you’ve heard of these before -- the need to forecast for multiple skill sets, changing business needs negate the usefulness of historical volume data, volume-driven by external events, not controlled by company -- or volume is seasonal and varies greatly, and volume patterns change frequently, making projections difficult.

Again, nobody has a crystal ball that actually works as anything other than a cute paperweight. But Monet officials are here to help, so they’ve put together some tips and best practices that might help:

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.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Chris DiMarco