Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Also required | Workforce Management |
| Access | Admin |
Getting a first forecast out of the product, and the handful of decisions that determine whether it is any use to you.
Set it up
- Confirm your business hours and holidays are correct.
- Choose what is being forecast: which queues, which channels.
- Import historical volume if you have it.
- Choose the algorithm.
- Generate a forecast and compare it against a period you remember.
Hours and holidays first
A forecast built on wrong opening hours or a missing public holiday is wrong in a way that is hard to spot afterwards, because the chart still looks plausible.
Ten minutes on the calendar before anything else.
Forecast per channel
Phone and messaging arrive in sharp peaks and need people at that moment. Email arrives all day and can be absorbed. One combined forecast overstaffs one and understaffs the other.
Check it against a period you know
Generate a forecast for last month and compare with what actually happened. That single check tells you more than any amount of configuration review.
Exclude the abnormal history
An outage week, a campaign, the fortnight a competitor was down. Leaving those in teaches the forecast that they are normal, and it will predict them again.
Handling time has to be real
Staffing comes from volume times handling time. Where tracking is not yet accurate, the forecast inherits that, so this is a reason to get tracking right first.
Expect to adjust it
A first forecast is a starting point. Reviewing it against actuals weekly for a couple of months is what makes it good, and there is no shortcut.
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