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