Forecasting and Scheduling in the Digital Era

Introduction

Forecasting is the first step in any workforce planning/management process. Enterprises must predict the volume of work to be completed within a certain amount of time (service level) while meeting quality expectations. This applies to all operating departments, including contact centers and back-office functions. In the early days of contact centers when calls were the only channel, companies would forecast their upcoming work by applying the Erlang C traffic modeling algorithm to historical data sets of incoming call volumes. This mathematical equation is good at predicting the volume of concurrent interactions (calls) to determine the number of agents required to respond to them within a prescribed service level. Although Erlang C was not perfect for projecting lengthy call center calls (it was designed to handle short directory assistance calls with no latency between them), with some modifications it did a decent job, although it erred on the side of overstaffing.

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