Seven Steps Your Contact Center Strategic Planning Process Needs

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Seven Steps Your Contact Center Strategic
Planning Process Needs

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1. Forecast all important metrics

• 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

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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

• 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

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6. Validate the relationship between volume and
services

• 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

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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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