Video: If It’s a Forecast – It’s Wrong

In this video series Call Centre Helper’s Jonty Pearce explains what you need to know about forecasting, and what they won’t tell you, starting with ‘if it’s a forecast… it’s wrong’.

#1 If It’s a Forecast… It’s Wrong

I’m Jonty Pearce from Call Centre Helper and I’m going to be taking you through the things that they won’t tell you about forecasting.

This is really a collection of learnings and techniques I have picked up along the way. The first thing I want to talk about is if it’s a forecast it’s wrong.

Effectively, we cannot see the future, but the one thing we can do in forecasting is we can examine the past. So in effect we’re not futurologists, in terms of forecasting, we are actually historians.

And one of the things that historians do, for instance, is look for patterns in the soil. This is an archaeological dig that my brother did in the 1970s at Housesteads in the Northeast of England, on Hadrian’s Wall.

And they started looking for patterns in the soil, things they could see, remnants of walls, of ditches, of burning and things such as that, so they look for patterns in the soil.

In the contact centre world we do something similar to historians, we look for patterns in the data. For instance:

• Does the data follow a trend?
• Is there a trend line that follows up?
• Is there a degree of seasonality?
• Is there seasonality and a trend?
• Do things happen at regular times overall?
• Or is the data random?

So that’s one of the things that we do as forecasters: looking for patterns in the data.

For more in this series watch these videos next:

• Getting Started With Forecasting
• Is Overhang Distorting Your Staffing Calculations?

Author: Jonty Pearce
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell