As most people in the call center industry know, balancing agent resources with call and contact volume is key part of the strategy for achieving call center efficiency. To accomplish this tricky balancing act, call center managers need the ability to accurately forecast call volume.
An accurate forecast is essential to arrive at an accurate schedule: Schedule too many agents for any given shift and they’ll be sitting around waiting for contacts to come in. Schedule too few and call hold times will increase, impacting customer satisfaction. This forecasting is also essential for long term planning in the area of recruiting and hiring.
Traditionally call center managers have relied on workforce management systems to produce these forecasts. Most of today’s WFM systems sport advanced analytics capabilities which enable this: The WFM system is integrated with the ACD (as well as the email and chat servers, if those are being used) and uses historical call data to arrive at a forecast. In this respect most WFM solutions do much to automate what has traditionally been a “manual” process: Before call center managers had to run complex calculations, such as Erlang C, and use vast spreadsheets to run forecasts that were really nothing more than a “best guess” based on historical patterns.
The problem, though, is that the unstable economy and other factors, including the impact of social media on customer behavior, have resulted in major fluctuations in the historical call volume cycles that most call centers have witnessed in the past. As such companies can no longer rely on historical call volume data alone as an accurate indicator of future volume. Instead they have to start leveraging predictive modeling in order to forecast based on multiple potential scenarios – and in order to arrive at accurate weekly, monthly and quarterly operations plans. Helping them to achieve this are simulation-based forecasting solutions, which use a much wider array of data in order to arrive at short-, medium- and long-term plans.
During a recent free webinar, “Forecasting and Planning with Significant Uncertainty and Planning for Unforeseen Events,” sponsored by Bay Bridge Decision Technologies, Ric Kosiba, co-founder and president of BayBridge, discussed methods for analyzing forecast risk as well as methods for planning for unknown events.
The webinar, presented on May 19, was the first in a three-part series of webinars being presented by Bay Bridge – the second webinar in the series, “Built to Hire- Putting Hire Recommendations into Action,” will be held June 23, and the third webinar, “True Staff Optimization,” will be presented November 17.
To access the archived version of the first in this three-part webinar series, click here. To learn more about Bay Bridge Decision technologies, check out this recent ContactCenterSolutions video interview.