A technical outage, a price change or a marketing campaign — and within hours contact volume multiplies. At the same time, qualified service staff are scarce. Between shortage and rising expectations, one discipline decides whether service holds: workforce planning.
Getting the right number of people onto the right channel at the right time keeps service levels and cost in balance — without expensive overstaffing and without queues that drive customers away.
Why planning is not an administrative sideshow
Workforce management covers forecasting contact volume, calculating staffing requirements and building the schedules that follow. In a tight labour market every planning error is expensive. Too many people on shift drives cost; too few lengthens waits and lowers availability. Both feed straight through to profitability and satisfaction.
There is a human effect on top. Chronic understaffing raises the load on the team, lowers motivation and fuels turnover — making positions that were already hard to fill more expensive still.
Forecasting: the foundation
Every plan starts with a forecast. Three figures form the basis: contact volume, average handle time, and the service level you have committed to. From these the required number of agents per interval is derived.
Historical data carries most of the weight, but it is not enough on its own. Campaigns, invoicing runs, product launches and public holidays shift the pattern — and none of them appear in last year’s figures unless somebody notes them.
Shrinkage: the most underestimated factor
The classic planning error is not in the forecast but in forgetting shrinkage: the time during which scheduled staff are not available for customer contact — holiday, sickness, training, breaks, after-call work. In practice this share usually sits between 25 and 35 per cent.
Concretely: if the calculation shows a requirement of ten agents, thirteen or fourteen need to be scheduled to hold the service level. Anyone ignoring shrinkage is structurally understaffed — despite an apparently correct sum.
From forecast to schedule: skills and channels
Modern planning does not stop at headcount. Customers arrive by phone, chat, email and messaging, and expect a competent answer on each. Skills-based planning therefore moves to the centre: it is not enough to have enough people on shift, the right abilities have to be on shift too.
That makes the plan more complex, but also more robust. A team of ten with three people who can handle billing questions is better placed for an invoicing peak than a team of twelve with none.
What the platform contributes
Planning needs data, and the data comes from operations. myContactCenter supplies the figures a forecast rests on: volume by channel and interval, handle times by case type, service level achieved, and the distribution of skills actually used.
Real-time dashboards close the loop in the other direction: when the day departs from the plan, it shows up while there is still time to react — rather than in next month’s report.
