seven steps your contact center strategic planning process needs
TRANSCRIPT
• Contact center managers tend to disproportionately focus on volume forecasting
• But the best centers also make sure that factors like shrinkage, attrition, wage rate, and handle time forecasts are spot on
1. Forecast all important metrics
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2. Weekly Planning, Not Monthly!
• It is tempting to develop forecasts and plans that are monthly, but this is a mistake
• Contact centers change significantly weekly. A monthly view is simply too general
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3. Forecast the Call Load
• The average handling times of almost all interactions occur in predictable and repeating patterns
• A good forecasting plan can predict the components of call load including talk time, after-call wrap-up and volumes accurately for future time periods, usually down to half-hours.
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4. Plan should be flexible
• One of the most talented workforce management gurus, Duke Witte, has a trick. He staffs to ensure that the number of agents in any week can flex up (overtime) or down (undertime) to maintain consistent service, even if his volumes are erratic. He calls this his “club length.”
• As long as he is staffed within a club length of actual volumes, his operation will produce consistent service
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5. Plan results from compromise
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• All organizations have more than one goal. While call centers may want to hit a specific service goal weekly, it also wants to produce a good work environment for its agents and a low-cost operation for its shareholders
• These things are all in conflict. The final resource plan and budget should be developed understanding the trade-offs of all of these elements
6. Validate the relationship between volume and services
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• Most contact center analysts use a variant of the Erlang-C calculation or a workload calculation. Both are notoriously inaccurate
• There are other methodologies (variants of simulation models) that are accurate, but whatever your algorithm, they should be proved accurate by comparing actual service delivery to forecasts
7. Variance Analysis
• All processes require a check. Variance analysis is simply looking back in time to see how well your plans were compared to what happened
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