I was talking about Forecasting and Planning for Call Centres with a gentleman on the plane earlier this week. He didn`t understand why his Call Centre is putting so much time and effort for poor results. After going over their daily results with him, it was clear I needed to post on the topic. Forecasting and Planning won`t bring the same results every day.
First, let’s start with the fact that the Call Centre management team wants to staff at the minimum required to achieve service levels. The required service levels good be daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
Most of our Call Centres have a weekly or monthly target. The Forecasting and Planning would be based on this monthly (yes, you can read “average”) SLA. It is not optimal for each day or each interval.
Why? Costs. Trying to hit 80% TSF each day requires more FTEs, time, effort, employee dissatisfaction, etc than trying to achieve 80% TSF for the month.
Tags: Forecast