Hi,
I had raised this concern earlier, however there were no inputs.
I am a forecaster in one of the call centre and my primary job is to forecast call volumes on daily, weekly and monthly basis.
as of now i am completely dependent on excel where i plot the historical data and derive to a forecast.
is there any application or software that we can use to forecast volumes and AHT.
Regards
Mitesh
Hi, there are a number of Workforce Management solutions that do provide these functions along with scheduling and numerous other functions. I have worked with / alonside a number of these over my career and they do the job very rapidly taking into account all factors ie seasonailty, day of week, week of month and yearly trending. the benefits are that the forecast generates extremely quickly and they then frees more time for yourself to analysis the results and plan in greater detail due to time saving the forecast process saves. I currently act as a consultant for a provider of such software (GMT) and the benefits we find for our customers are massive. we see increases in forecasting accuracy upto 98%+ and in return better working conditions for the agents themselves afterwards due to the scheduling function which places agents in the most suitable and efficient time slots (inc breaks and planned activities)and finally cost reductions for the operations. The AHT calculations also gets taken into account within the forecasts (in relation to the trends) and can also be factored against impact of new agents and their profficiency in the skills they are assigned. Any questions please feel free to ask
Hi Mitesh,
Rather than recommending a named Application or Software (I don't think it is allowed on this Forum...) have you considered applying any industry standard formula's or algorithm's to your data?
A quick Google search tells me that there is no end of assistance available, out there... even as Excel add-in's...
Tony
Hello Mitesh,
My experience has been that it very much depends on the type of business you are in. If your calls are predominantly marketing driven the volumes (and even handle times potentially) can vary greatly, and whatever past history is may not be a good predictor at all. In that case, WORK REALLY CLOSELY with the marketing department to figure out mail drop schedules, anticipated response rates, figure out from the campaign what sort of questions you are likely to get so you can estimate of handle time, etc. Then layer these workloads on top of your base workloads and pray!
If you have a steady customer base with the same types of issues every month then wfm tools may be of help.
Also, the longer the horizon the less helpful past history is going to be. Intra-day and daily forecasts should be handled by your wfm tool; my experience beyond that has always been that you are very careful interpreting the data -if your gut feel thinks they are wrong then you are probably right.
I'm a forecasting specialist for an insurance company that deals with in excess of 100000 calls per week over multiple lines.
I personally will not use a WFM tool to manage or run my forecasts as I find them to be very inflexible.
I have also found that when we utilised the WFM tool we had to consistantly extract the data into excel and run checks against the histories to ensure that the forecasts and profiles it was producing were percieved to be accurate.
On this basis I felt and my department agreed that the most prudent approach to forecasting was using excel modelling for volume and AHT.
We have found it to be far more accurate as well.
Hi Fatburt,
Totally agree with you - I've never found WFM solutions to do a good job on longer term workload forecasting. It is generally too assumption or intuition based to rely on just historicals.
Hi Fatburt
I am not yet using the WFM solution my company has due to technical issues in the process of being resolved. I have used different WFM tools over a few years and found them to have multiple value adds. What you put in is what you will get out. As DeanC indicated (seasonality, day of week, week of month and yearly trending. the benefits are that the forecast generates extremely quickly and they then frees more time for yourself to analysis the results and plan in greater detail due to time saving the forecast process saves).A critical factor is data integrity from your data source that feeds into the WFM software and normalizing forecasts.
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