Forecasting

Forecasting is the basis of estimating required resources to handle a contact center’s workload. Using historical data generated by the ACD routing system for both voice and other media types, forecasting allows you to adjust key modifiers to predict the number of agents required, by interval, to handle the predicted workload.

The Forecasting tool available in Contact Center Client and Workforce Scheduling enables users to quickly choose historical data from both voice and multimedia queues or queue groups to use in the forecast, providing average transaction traffic by day of week, by media, as well as by historic manned agents and handling statistics for user-selected intervals of time. Supervisors can create forecasts based on historic contact center volumes and manually adjust various modifiers to generate hypothetical or future anticipated traffic scenarios, optimizing the balance between the agents required to handle the anticipated traffic with the expected handling time, wrap up time and Service Level objectives. The Forecasting tool lets you adjust key statistics together with intra-day contact volumes rather than only daily statistics, which provides a much more accurate output of agents required per interval. For example, you may have a situation where calls coming into your call center are more complex earlier in the day and/or earlier in the week creating a higher demand for agents to be available at these times. It is possible that handling time drops throughout the day and the demand for agents reduces, allowing for alternate options for agents such as off line work, team meetings or performance reviews.

Your ability to forecast is limited only by the available ACD routing data collected and available in your SQL database. For example, you may choose to take the last few weeks to help predict the next few weeks, the last year to help predict the average traffic per week, or the period of time in the past where you ran a particular campaign/season to anticipate the amount of traffic to expect for a similar upcoming campaign, season, and so on. After you run a forecast, you could examine the data and make adjustments based on current or anticipated contact center conditions. You could then tweak the forecast as required.