What is Capacity Planning in a Contact Center?

Capacity planning, which is also known as resourceplanning or strategic workforce planning, is the process of determining howmany workforce resources an organization needs today, tomorrow, and as much as five years into the future. In the contact center space, capacity planningallows leaders to determine the perfect mix of employees—based on theirassociated skills, capabilities, and preferences—to perfectly handle customer demand: no more, no less.

• At the job level, capacity planning ensures that the right talent is in the right job at theright time.
• At the company level,capacity planning ensures that the organization is neither understaffed noroverstaffed.
• At the strategic level,capacity planning identifies the gapsbetween the current and future workforce (two to five years out), and takessteps to assure the desired quantity, quality, cost, and agility of personnelare in place as the company advances.

Why is Capacity Planning Important in aContact Center?

Capacity planning enables contact center leaders tooptimize workforce investments, both in the short term and the long term. Byensuring the right agents are on-hand to provide the right support when andwhere customers need it, capacity planning is critical to delivering a positivecustomer experience (CX). Above and beyond CX, effective capacity planninggenerates value in other ways, including:

Cost Reduction

By analyzing a range offuture scenarios, contact center leaders are empowered with data to effectivelybalance workforce costs. Armed with insights, leaders can confidently determineif it’s most cost-efficient to hire, outsource, or upskill based on a dynamicblend of inputs. With a precise understanding of how many workers will beneeded at any given time (including up to five years into the future), leaderscan proactively plan for turnover and reduce unexpected attrition costs throughimproved talent recruitment and management strategies.

Efficient Talent Recruitment and Management

Capacity planning fuelssmarter recruitment efforts in which the right skillsets can be targeted andonboarded at the right time.  Inanticipation of future needs, training programs can be created and rolled outto upskill current employees against any number of changes ahead, includingtechnology transformations (such as the adoption of a new application, system,or service, like automation) and evolving products or company offerings.Moreover, by strategically aligning continuous skill-building efforts withfuture business objectives contact centers can:

• Boost the success of hiring and retention efforts. A Gallup study noted that seventy-onepercent of American workers report being “extremely interested” in paid trainingand upskilling opportunities. Moreover, 48% of workers wouldswitch to a new job if it offered desired skills training opportunities, and 65% believeemployer-provided upskilling is very important when evaluating a potential newjob. Modern workforce development systems can seamlessly deploy customizedlearning and development programs based on interests, job requirements, andbusiness needs while performance data and insights enable managers to monitortraining engagement, progress, and opportunities for growth.
• Prepare for the future by forecasting and internally building the workforce skills needed ahead. By 2025, as manyas half of yourcurrent employees will require reskilling if they remain in their currentroles. Contact center leaders must proactively invest in skill-buildingprograms that efficiently build the capabilities needed in the future.

Improved Business Agility

When the COVID-19 pandemichit, companies had to find new ways of doing business, seemingly overnight.Revenue projections and forecasts for growth had to be reevaluated. Contactcenters suddenly had too many employees who could not work on-site with jobs thatcouldn’t be performed remotely. Even the best-laid workforce plans wereworthless, and contact center leaders were forced to quickly respond to theunexpected.
If COVID-19 taught usanything, it is to expect the unexpected. Scenario planning helps contactcenters build resilience and flexibility into workforce planning,enabling leaders to follow a “business as usual” scenario while preparing for awide range of “what ifs.” By proactively planning for potential scenarios,contact center leaders can quickly assess and adapt in the face of crisis,preventing disruptions to service while maintaining a positive customer andemployee experience. 

What’sNeeded for Effective Contact Center Capacity Planning?

Precise capacity planning requires an increasinglycomplex range of inputs, including:

• Historical data
• Forecasting andstaffing parameters
• Operational targets,such as service level objectives (SLAs), occupancy, and shrinkage

Moreover,workforce planning requires contact center leaders to see into the future andplan for various scenarios. Ideally, workforce planners should be able to modelany number of scenarios based on different forecast data. If forecast data isaccurate, the resulting plans are converted into scheduling, hiring,onboarding, and training activities. If forecasts are off, planners can easilymodel the “new reality” and adjust the plan quickly.

How AI is Advancing Forecasting

Ongoing developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling increasingly accurate projections. Advancedstatistical methods are helping contact centers realize consistent customerservice, improve retention, and lower costs through better forecasting. Aprecise forecast requires not only an understanding of traffic during normal, day-to-day operations, but also the ability to account for a wide range ofscenarios. AI-based forecasting enablescontact centers to:

• Automatically evaluatedozens of forecasting algorithms and determine the model with the greatestaccuracy.
• Increase the accuracyof the staffing plan.
• Increase theoperational efficiency of the staffing plan.
• Adapt to changing datapatterns.

How to GetStarted in Capacity Planning

Business conditions can change in the blink of an eye, butcontact center leaders don’t have to simply react to short-term chaos. Byadopting best practices related to planning, leaders can better anticipate andprepare for an uncertain future. The following four steps provide a frameworkfor capacity planning, and a starting point for contact center leaders seekingan advantage amidst constant change.

Step 1: Capacity planning begins with thebusiness and organizational strategy of the contact center and its client(s).

Long-term capacity planning requires input from theentire organization and/or the contact center’s clients to ensure staffinglevels and capabilities are aligned with future strategic business objectives.

To determine the humanresources the contact center needs, the organization must first know where it wants to go.For a contact center, that must include understanding future objectives and the future objectives of external clients or the internal businesses served.

Questionsto ask your client to understand their future business objectives:

• Do you plan ongrowing or expanding your current product lines?
• Are you venturinginto new markets or services?
• Are you phasing outolder products and services?
• Do you anticipatetechnological advances or incoming competitors that will disrupt the market?
• In what segments doyou expect your customer base to grow or shrink in the next five years?

Questionsto answer about the contact center’s future business objectives:

• Does the contact center plan onupdating its technological service solutions to incorporate higher levels ofautomation or omnichannel engagement?
• Is there a goal of streamlining operational structures to reduce management costs?
• Should changes to the work environment be made, allowing for more agent-driven autonomy around when and where they work?

The answers to thesequestions, and more, must be incorporated into capacity plans to truly fuel future readiness. All these factors will require proactiveupskilling, change management, recruitment, onboarding, and heightenedperformance management activities to ensure seamless, high-value support.

Step 2: Analysis of the current workforce in terms of size, quality, cost, agility, performance, and future potential.

Once the future workforce formation is understood, it is possible to begin assessing the current state to identify gaps.

The quality of your currentstate assessment will directly impact the value of resulting upskilling and recruitment strategies. Precise current state assessments ensure less wastethrough more targeted upskilling and the enhanced utilization of existingskills and capabilities.

Step 3: Envisioning the future in multiple scenarios and preparing for probable outcomes.

The future is unpredictable.Capacity planning includes the development of multiple scenarios and usestangible examples to plot possible outcomes. This process often highlightsweaker or unpleasant indications of change that contact center leaders mightotherwise overlook. This phase is an evaluation of various “if-then”scenarios that help prepare for continuity, expansion, disruption, and evensurprise. The “what ifs” should be expanded to include:

• Multiple long-termforecasts that account for the different potential volume and average handletime projections.
• “What-if” plans foreach potential staffing scenario.
• A “what-if” plan thatincludes shutting down some contact types to focus on other contact types (ifthis is a possibility in the organization).

Step 4: Building the workforce of tomorrow while continuing to serve clients today.

Strategic workforce planning helps contact centers foresee interim and ultimate formations of their workforce and prepare for them accordingly. Internal upskilling and reskilling programs allow contactcenter leaders to optimize existing resources; however, it can eat into utilization progress. To combat this, leaders can deploy training programscustomized to build skills at the individual level to ensure every second oftraining time generates value, and automated intra-day scheduling tools can promote training during idle or slow periods.

How DoWorkforce Capacity Planning Tools and Software Help?

As part of a workforcemanagement suite, capacity planning is infused with real-time and long-termdata, empowering advanced modeling for long-range planning with advancedinteractive visualization capabilities. The manual collection and integrationof the myriad dynamic inputs needed to effectively future-proof a workforce issimply impossible at the speed of change. Capacity planning tools and softwareenable rapid pivots to long-term workforce plans, empowering contact centerswith the agility to survive and thrive amidst a whirlwind of continuous change.

Start Here: NICE Workforce Management EnhancedStrategic Planner

NICE Workforce Management (WFM) Enhanced Strategic Planner(ESP) helps contact centers capitalize on their full long-termplanning potential by providing the answers and insights needed to make betterworkforce planning decisions for long-term success.
NICE WFM ESP helps you intelligentlyplan for the future by predicting how anticipated or potential staffingscenarios will impact your contact center’s ability to meet performance goals.By leveraging AI forecasting from NICE Workforce Management, Enhanced StrategicPlanner considers the needs of your staff, channels, and business rules to makeprecise predictions. Armed with ESP’s powerful tools, you can consider allvariables relevant to your contact center and make decisions based on its uniqueanticipated staffing needs. NICE WFM ESP helps you control costs, developbetter hiring plans and improve customer service with these advanced featuresand capabilities:

• Advancedstatistical models: ESP leveragesAI-generated forecasts from NICE Workforce Management that adapt to yourhistorical data, enabling more accurate predictions helping you solve futurechallenges.
• ‘Reverse-solve’for performance targets: Projectedperformance based on actual supplied staffing to understand better impacts ofstaffing to result for projected service level, ASA, and Occupancy.
• Digital channelmanagement: ESP handles digital channels’ mean concurrency forlong-term strategic planning.
• Dynamic charting: ESP allows easily editable drag-n-drop dynamic chartingwith one, two, or four chart views at monthly, daily, or weekly levels.
• Interactivereporting: ESP provides insightfulchart and grid interaction to pinpoint anomalies.
• Shrinkagesub-categories: ESP allowsuser-defined shrinkage, providing greater granularity at the rolled-up orsub-category level, empowering immediate insights for real-time discussionsaround shrinkage planning based on intelligent and accurate decisions onshrinkage tradeoffs.
• Effectiveback-office planning: ESP supportsnon-workload FTE requirements.
• “What-if”planning: ESP enables you to predictthe potential impact of scenarios on your workforce and performance metrics,such as a business acquisition or staffing changes, so you can make a case foryour contact center’s hiring needs and react faster to business changes.
• Intuitive design: ESP has a user-friendly responsive UI design thatautomatically adapts to the browser space to ensure content consistency acrossdevices with various screen sizes. Additionally, ESP provides an intuitivetimeline orientation to enhance exploratory discussions.
• Secure anywhereaccessibility: Single sign-on, securecloud connectivity with infrastructure, maintenance, and management by NICEensures your contact center’s data safety while keeping it accessible in the work anywhere environments.

Strategic workforce planningcan help contact centers reduce and optimize costs; prepare for market changesand talent pool fluctuations; create an effective recruitment strategy for bothshort and long term; and ultimately, improve the productivity and viability ofthe business.
To read more about workforcemanagement and workforce optimization visit our WorkforceOptimization (WFO) guide.