Forecasting the Call Center for the Year Ahead

Effective call center forecasting isn’t just about day-to-day or week-to-week operations. Accurate forecasts are also critical for budgeting and hiring. With a new year beginning, many contact centers will begin the budget-setting process for the year and make hiring changes to either add to or subtract from the current headcount. Without a good forecast, this process becomes a shot in the dark.  So how do you go about building a call center volume forecast for the next year?

Break It into Smaller Parts

Smart contact centers will break the year down into quarters and months. If you have a highly cyclical business, November may look nothing like March, so it’s important that you’re accurate not only for the year as an aggregate, but for seasons and months.

Use Historical Data

Your call center’s history is going to be your best framework for a new year’s schedule. Based on an analysis of last year’s monthly volume, you can break your schedule into smaller parts. If the last day of March, for example, saw two percent of your monthly call volume, then you can do some easy math to forecast the day. If you’re planning on 10,000 calls in March and you got two percent of your monthly calls on March 31^st last year, then expect 200 calls on that day.  

To determine trends, you may even want to look at previous years to confirm trends or identify one-time anomalies. Many experts recommend looking back three years, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert), and your workforce management can help with this.

“If you already have a workforce management solution integrated with your call center software, it will be easy to analyze historical information for staffing and contact center budgeting purposes,” according to the blog post. “If you don’t have a workforce management solution in place, the sooner you get one in place, the sooner you will be able to benefit from historical data.”

Try to Predict Special Days

While it’s important to look at monthly figures, it’s a guarantee that there will be some days that go completely off the rails from the forecast. This may be due to unpredictable factors such as staff illnesses, weather, outages or local or national happenings. Alternatively, it could be because of events you can plan for, such as marketing campaigns, new product releases, vacations, training, computer upgrades, etc. Look at the calendar and coordinate with marketing and sales, operations, HR, IT and other departments to try and identify what events might cause trouble for the schedule, and when.

Revisit your Forecasts

No one’s going to build a perfect forecast, so it’s important to reevaluate it regularly as the months and the year passes. If you don’t, your forecast will fall further out of step with the actual results, according to the Monet blog.

“Growth can be more aggressive, chat more popular or new product launches more difficult to accommodate than predicted,” according to Monet. “Recompiling quarterly and monthly forecasts, which is usually done 30 to 60 days out, can enhance the effectiveness of long-term planning efforts.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle