Call Center Planning at a Glance!

Much like the drummer in a band, there is a heartbeat to every organization. In the Contact Center world, that’s contact and capacity planning. What we are talking about here is a high-level overview of this and later posts will dive a bit deeper into different aspects of this process.
(Insert some funky science channel tune here)

In my day job (at night, I'm Batman..shhh), I plan contact forecasts (Supply) and workforce management (Demand) for a multinational company. I'm actually one of many in this role at my company and there are plenty at all other contact centers as well. This part of the organization really falls into a simple cycle:

You might be saying, "Woah! That looks really simple!" and I assure you that it can be simple or difficult, depending on the inputs. Capacity planning is very similar to financial planning and accounting in that you are dealing with relatively simple math at its core with the tougher part being analysis and monitoring. So, I'm going to cover each of these parts briefly…

Forecasting: When staffing for a contact center, the big question is….how many contacts are we going to get. Also, when are we going to get these contacts? There is always a basis for how many contacts are being forecasted, whether its shipments, sales, subscribers, or something else…it boils down to the same thing. How many contacts do I expect per insert unit here. Once the basis and the contacts per that unit are known, you then must forecast at what time contacts are going to arrive.

Modeling: When staffing for contact centers, most follow a pretty similar curve of less contacts on the early/end of day and the concentration being right in the center of the day. Depending on the field this is being planned for, the days may change (weekend heavy business) or times may change (heavy late-night business). When modeling this, if the company is already established, the model would be made based off of the trends for other lines of business already launched and inputs from the new line. Once this is completed, contacts from the forecast above are broken down to the interval-level (usually 15 or 30min) and smoothly curved to staff against. Once this is completed, you analyze the data for implementation.

Analysis: When analyzing for implementation, you are looking to know how many people are needed at what time to answer all of the volume being forecasted. In most cases, you would use average contact time, how occupied you want them to be, and what time-off should be planned for. When creating this, most capacity planners use a model known as Erlang. I can go into Erlang at a later time, as it's a pretty cool model by itself. Using erlang, required headcount by interval would be created, then schedules to meet that need created. Once this is all done…you launch.

Launch: Not lunch! Silly Goose! Launching is really the easiest part (most of the time at least). You make sure that the phone lines/chat channels/email inboxes work properly and hire people to work shifts that were identified during the analysis. Once launched, monitoring must be done.

Monitoring: Once launched, monitoring must be put in place to ensure that all of the inputs above don't change or if they do change that the supply (people) can react to the demand (customer contacts). This basically starts the entire cycle over and either new shifts are created or overtime/time-off is allocated to bridge gaps in the planning temporarily.

CONCLUSION! Maybe?

As a high-level overview, I hope this helps to explain what contact center staffing is based on and around. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below.

Follow me to get more details in the coming weeks regarding contact center planning, or one of the MANY different things I'll be talking about!