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Workforce Management: Scheduling Agents Around Real Demand
Most contact centres are staffed by a roster that was written once and edited slightly since. Demand moved; the roster did not. The result is visible in both directions: agents sitting idle for long stretches, and agents drowning at exactly the times the roster assumed would be quiet. Workforce management is the discipline of matching supply to demand, and it starts with an uncomfortable fact: the roster is not the plan, it is a guess, and the guess should be checked against data. This article covers how to forecast from real history, how to build a roster that reflects it, and what to measure once it is live.
Forecast From History, Not From Sentiment
Demand forecasts are commonly built from last year's pattern with a confidence adjustment, which is fine when the business has not changed. When it has, the adjustment is still last year's. A defensible forecast breaks demand into components that have reasons: baseline traffic, weekly rhythm, seasonal variation, and known events such as campaigns, holidays, or product launches. Each component gets a number because there is a reason for it, and the forecast becomes something that can be argued with rather than adjusted.
| Demand component | Where the signal is | Where teams usually miss it |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly rhythm | Historical arrival pattern by day and hour | Treating Monday as 'similar to Tuesday' because they look the same on a chart |
| Seasonal variation | Month-over-month and year-over-year comparison | Two years of history that predate a channel change |
| Known events | Campaign schedule, release calendar, holiday calendar | Marketing schedules known only to marketing |
| Shrinkage and effective capacity | Shift length, breaks, training time | Planning on scheduled hours rather than available minutes |
| Lossy demand | Abandonment and callbacks | Demand measured only by answered calls |
Roster to the Forecast, Then Review Both
A roster is a plan for supply. Building it from the forecast is the easy part; the hard part is accepting that both will be revised. The useful discipline is to review forecast versus actual every period, and where they diverged, decide whether the forecast was wrong or the demand changed. That decision determines what to fix: a better model, or a roster that reflects reality.
- Staff to the busiest hour in each window rather than to the average
- Include shrinkage in the plan, including breaks, training, and after-call work
- Cross-skill enough agents that the roster survives one queue being busy
- Build in a small reserve rather than running at one hundred percent of forecast
- Review at a rhythm the business can actually keep, not a theoretical ideal
Measure Adherence and Occupancy
Two numbers tell you whether the roster is real: adherence, the share of planned time spent on the planned activity, and occupancy, the share of time actually talking or dealing with contacts. High adherence with low occupancy means overstaffing; low adherence means the plan is not being followed, which usually means the plan does not match reality. These are management measures, not performance measures, and they should be read together with the customer-facing numbers they serve.
Redstone Approach
Redstone supports contact centre operations on the REX IP-PBX platform with detailed call and queue reporting that provides the arrival and service data workforce planning needs. Our teams can help you extract historical patterns, build a first forecast from real data, and define the reporting that keeps the roster honest. WFM tooling and commercial arrangements remain yours; we scope reporting and integration work in writing.
Redstone Systems, Inc. founded in Delaware, USA in December 2002, has been the ODM vendor for many well-known communications companies, serving the Southeast Asian market. In 2020, Redstone Systems will begin to return to the North America market with its self-developed brand.
Redstone has a complete product line of intelligent voice gateways, providing IP-PBXs, analog VoIP gateways (FXS/FXO), digital VoIP gateways (E1/T1), border appliances, and session boundary controllers (SBCs).
With advanced technology in digital signal processor (DSP), speech coding and speech processing, as well as efficient operational tools such as cloud remote management, auto provisioning, Redstone gateways are widely used in markets of enterprise communications, cloud communications, call centers, operators’ IMS/SIP trunks, bringing users friendly, efficient and reliable communication experience.
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