Forecasting in-bound work volumes, and then scheduling staff to meet that demand is key to all contact centre and back office operations. When calls are driven by out-bound marketing activities, or a changing customer base, planning can be difficult. This has a serious impact on businesses. Overstaffing is wasteful and increases costs whereas understaffing leads to missed sales opportunities and a poor customer experience.

Simulating performance and the impact of changes in contact centres is key to the development of an efficient and robust operation. The ability to predict service level and costs based on different operating models can help identify the best strategies for the development of the contact centre. Having the ability to determine the impact of taking advisors off the phone, blending back office activities into the front office, or changing call priorities is critical for informed day to day management.

Optimisation of advisor shifts to the demand ensures that the most expensive asset in the contact centre is put to good use. At the same time recognising advisors lifestyle preferences to work on certain days, between certain hours or on specific shifts increase advisor satisfaction and reduces attrition of staff. Empowering advisors through web-based tools allows them to request holiday, swap shifts and monitor their performance without consuming management time.

The final piece of the jigsaw is accurate and efficient measurement, data capture and reporting. Comprehensive reporting of advisor performance, adherence to schedule, and quality and appraisal scores facilitates performance management. Tracking the vital statistics relating to call volumes, staffing levels and call handle times is essential and supports all subsequent forecasting, simulation and workforce optimisation activities. We cannot manage if we do not measure.

Royal and Sun Alliance won the prestigious Professional Planning Forum Innovation of the Year award for their work using the CACI Agent Performance application. This has resulted in sales increasing by up to 100%, call abandonment dropping by 30% and a decrease in sickness absence of 10%.

Lloyds TSB achieved forecasting performance significantly more accurate that conventional approaches - resulting in a 40% reduction in peak and average error. This translated to a 10% to 15% reduction in head count or equivalent increase in capacity.

Orange realised savings and inefficiencies of over £1.5M / year due to overstaffing based on simple resource planning models. In some cases there was 10% more staff than was actually necessary to achieve service level.