Our Product Manager, Barry Jones, shares his thoughts following an interesting conversation with one of our customers.
Forecasting contact centre demand is something I understand. However, significantly smarter and more experienced people than me can do this really well.
I’m fortunate that a lot of our customers and users are not only brilliant at forecasting, but they are equally brilliant at both patiently letting me go down rabbit holes trying to understand it and then explaining why I am (most of the time) wrong.
So, why forecast demand in your contact centre? Well, simply put, it creates a demand profile that planning teams in organisations can schedule their call centre teams to meet. A little deeper than this, it can ensure that business metrics, such as Service Levels or Abandon Rates can be hit, ideally without overworking those teams. It creates efficiency.
QStory is really good at understanding your forecast (demand) and your schedules (supply) and then constantly trying to optimise how your agents are deployed to tasks to get all the jobs done whilst still hitting your metrics; think frontline demand vs back-office tasks vs meetings vs breaks vs coaching etc. This happens in near-real time.
Now something I do know is that a forecast is just that, a forecast. A plan. The reality is often quite varied so what happens when you have created the right level of supply, but the demand is lower, or higher? That’s another thing QStory is good at, understanding real demand, its variance to the plan and then recommending what to do about it. To do this, we might recommend a new forecast for the rest of today based on what has happened this morning as well as adjustments to staffing and/or workloads based on this.
I was talking to one of our customers recently on this topic (a seasoned and very smart planner) and we were looking at ‘today’. They questioned me on the efficacy of a reforecast as we deliberated about applying it or sticking to the original plan. The re-forecasted plan overloaded the first few intervals with ‘too many’ agents and then thinned out the schedule, quite a lot, as the day would progress.
It’s only when I started to discuss their goals and metrics that this started to make sense. They target a relatively low (8%) abandon rate but are very keen not to overload their teams so look to keep their metrics around occupancy and utilisation quite conservative.
That’s what the reforecast was trying to do for them. Look after the abandon rate early in the day, let it creep up but don’t let it get near 15% or 20%, ensure enough coverage to control this and then ease the reins as the day unfolds.
If we hit an abandon rate above 20% early, then they would have to:
- Chase all day to get it back down to 8%
- Risk the day ending above target
- Serve fewer customers
- Overload the agents and real-time teams
They risk missing out on all their goals for the day.
That’s one of the ways that QStory can mitigate these risks and help you solve these challenges, every day.
If you have a similar focus, similar challenges (or any challenges with customer contact), I’d love to hear about them as we can probably help. Get in touch!