six attributes of a great contact center plan
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1. Plan Should Consider Risk Factors
• Many operations are made complex because of seasonality and variability. Volumes, handle times, sick times, absence, agent attrition, contact rates, and other important metrics are both seasonal and variable
• Knowing the risk factors, you should be able to change your organization’s plans. If you know weather affects your volumes, then a history of weather’s influence should inform your plan in terms of staffing to manage variability
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2. Plan Should Be Accurate
• Most contact center managers look for an accurate volume forecast, which is important. But it is also vital that other important metrics are forecasted well. For instance, sick time and other shrinkage items are important to forecast
• If the forecast of an item affects the accuracy of your plan, then you have to correct it
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3. Plan Should Be Optimal, Not Wasteful
• Plans that are developed using just-in-time staffing algorithms do a great job of squeezing out wasteful over-staffing
• These algorithms should consider learning curves and training time, as well as the differences across various centers that handle the same calls
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4. Include Financials
• In many organizations, the capacity plan is the purview of the operation, while the budget is the responsibility of finance
• But keep in mind that while developing the capacity plan—and doing all of the what-if scenarios that go with the capacity plan—marginal costs and marginal revenues of any what-if should be a prominent part of the analysis
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5. Optimize Capacity Plan
• Once you know how many agents are needed weekly, you must put together a hiring, overtime, undertime, and controllable shrinkage plan. Optimization algorithms work nicely for this (and save you money!)
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6. Executive Decision-Making Meetings
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• The best companies view their planning review meetings as decision-making meetings (and not as a “beat up the forecaster” meeting). Make these productive by using variance as an item that indicates change and an executive decision.
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Successful contact center operations invest in their planning and use it to make great decisions. Take a look at your planning process and see whether these best practices are part of your procedure!
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