In today's fast-paced business environment, customer experience has become a key differentiator for organisations across various industries. One critical element in ensuring exceptional customer service, is contact centre capacity planning. This process involves determining the optimal resources, such as staff, technology, and infrastructure, required to handle customer interactions effectively and efficiently. In this blog, we will explore the importance of contact centre capacity planning and how Anaplan can significantly improve its operational and strategic success.
Capacity planning enables contact centres to allocate the right number of agents at the right times, ensuring sufficient coverage during peak periods and avoiding overstaffing during slower times. This ensures customers can connect with an agent quickly, leading to higher first-call resolution rates and reduced customer frustration, improving both CSAT and NPS scores. Additionally, minimising unnecessary costs associated with overstaffing or inadequate resource allocation, leading to significant cost savings.
Anaplan automatically generates forward-looking demand for agent time, skill requirements, and levels of performance and twinning that with related data on availably of agents. With this information, managers can make data-driven decisions to optimise resource allocation. By assigning agents to specific queues or channels based on their expertise, organisations can ensure faster resolution times and a higher first-contact resolution rate.
Fidenda helped a retail bank optimise their contact centre capacity planning, creating an intraday level forecast utilising Anaplan’s statistical forecasting capabilities. This factored a number of different variables including seasonality profiling and marketing & event overlays. The solution highlighted key capacity issues (over/under staffing) in the intraday short term, as well as weekly and long-term horizons, providing different lenses to the different stakeholders – from tactical level scheduling through to C-suite strategic vision. This led to several operational benefits including reduced costs through reduced reliance on overtime and agency staffing.
Proper capacity planning prevents agent burnout by ensuring appropriate workload distribution. By maintaining an optimal staff-to-workload ratio, contact centres can improve employee satisfaction, reduce turnover rates, and create a positive work environment. Happy and engaged agents tend to provide better customer service, further enhancing the overall customer experience.
Anaplan can analyse historical and forward-looking data by employee to highlight where there are overcapacity verses expectations. This can be further enriched by incorporating attrition data that highlights the trends between working patterns and leavers. At a retail bank, Fidenda used historical and forward-looking data to analyse where there were capacity issues that could impact the wellbeing and capability of staff. Fidenda utilised Anaplan to highlight these areas and manage a process of resolving this moving forward and to engage where required.
For any organisation ensuring that their planning process translated to real time benefits is critical. The information garnered from the forecasting process should enable an organisation to have accurate contact centre rostering by utilising the detailed day-to-day plans.
Anaplan can provide a level of operational detail in its forecasts that can be immediately translated to the current day operations. Fidenda has utilised intraday forecasting in the private and public sectors to generate real time rostering requirements. These feed the operational rostering capability and significantly reduce the time and effort required to create the final roster as well as greatly improving the efficiency of the resourcing.
Contact centre planning is dependent on a number of different variables, many of which can have a significant impact on resourcing and cost. Therefore, organisations want to prepare for different potential situations – for example surges in demand, changes in the nature of the workforce or expansion of the organisation – and require multiple scenarios which model these out. Having access to this information enables organisations to be more robust against potential change and have clear plans of action in place to mitigate them.
Anaplan can easily facilitate different scenarios – taking the base plan and allowing users to flex different drivers to see what the impact is on the overall capacity plan and profitability. Anaplan’s native versioning enables comparison of different scenarios to enable organisations to use the tool to work out the most optimal way they organise their contact centres.
Leveraging “what if?” Scenario planning functionality in Anaplan Fidenda helped a retail bank to flex out-of-office shrinkage and in-office shrinkage/abstractions to inform better decisions on future contact centre capacity forecasting. One example, is that they used scenarios to model the most optimal shrinkage levels when overstaffed and understaffed in order to flatten the demand curve, maximising forecasted occupancy throughout the year.
Contact centre capacity planning is not merely a support function, but a strategic imperative for businesses committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences. By utilising Anaplan to accurately forecast customer demands, optimise resources, and leverage data-driven insights, contact centres can enhance customer satisfaction, increase operational efficiency, and drive cost savings. Anaplan empowers organisations to optimise their contact centre operations by providing powerful workforce forecasting, intelligent resource allocation, shift optimisation, real-time performance monitoring, and scenario planning capabilities. By leveraging Anaplan's robust planning platform, businesses can enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and provide a seamless customer experience. Embracing Anaplan is a strategic move towards optimising contact centre planning and staying ahead in today's highly competitive customer service landscape. Get in touch with Fidenda to discuss how you can optimise your contact centre planning or for a demo to show the power of Anaplan.
