Contact center leaders face a myriad of challenges every day. At the forefront of customer experience, the pressure is on them to deliver the right experience on the right channel, every single time.
Agents must be available to communicate with customers across channels and be highly efficient. Many contact centers are looking to improve this efficiency by setting targets of answering 90% of calls in 15 seconds rather than the old benchmark of 80% of calls in 20 seconds.
This pressure is compounded by the complexity of managing both in-house and outsourced staff, fluctuating call volumes, and figuring out how to best deploy AI to handle low-level inquiries while maintaining service quality. Add growing cost pressures to this mix and it’s clear that relying on the status quo will not help leaders overcome these challenges.
It's time to rethink the way workforce planning in contact centers works and move beyond spreadsheets. With the right modern tools, organizations can reduce costs and wait times, minimize under- and overstaffing, and improve customer service through better skills and capacity alignment.
In this blog, we’ll look at workforce planning strategies for contact centers that have been effective across financial services, healthcare, and a range of other sectors.
Planning for multichannel communication
Contact centers are expected to meet customers where they are, across multiple communication channels — phone, email, chat, text, social media, and even video conferencing. Whether a customer prefers a phone call to discuss a portfolio shift or a live chat for product inquiries, each channel brings different service expectations and staffing requirements. Phone interactions, in particular, often require deeper domain expertise and more highly trained agents, as they must respond in real time with little opportunity to pause, research, or reference a knowledge base article (KBA). Having skilled staff available to respond seamlessly and consistently across these interactions is critical. Even a brief lag in service on any channel could prompt customers to seek services elsewhere, resulting in damage to brand reputation and lost revenue.
Multichannel communication adds complexity to staffing and forecasting because each communication channel has its own unique patterns of demand and customer behavior. Historical trends and data for one channel may not apply to others, making it increasingly challenging to forecast and deliver optimal service levels.
According to CX Today, 79% of consumers will stop doing business with a brand after just one bad customer experience.
Outsourcing logistics
This complexity is further exacerbated when business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors are involved. Maintaining quality control and seamless communication between in-house and outsourced teams can be difficult. Relying on spreadsheets to juggle the logistics of who is responsible for which channel and when leads to coverage gaps and inconsistent service quality.
Seasonality and unpredictable call volumes
Another major challenge for contact center leaders is managing demand fluctuations. For healthcare, this could be during open enrollment or during the flu season as we discussed in a previous blog, or for retail or travel it could be around sales periods, promotions, or holidays.
For financial services organizations, fluctuations could include the rush of inquiries during tax season, market volatility, or when regulatory changes are announced, all of which cause overwhelming surges in contact center volumes.
These peaks in activity are not only hard to predict, but also difficult to staff for.
Coordinating staffing levels and keeping costs in check between in-house and outsourced teams during these periods requires precise forecasting and planning.
Without an advanced capacity planning solution, many organizations struggle to source and deploy the right number of agents with the right skill sets at the right times. The result is either overstaffing (and unnecessary costs) or understaffing (leading to increased overtime, longer wait times, and poor customer experiences).
AI and automation: A double-edged sword
Gartner reports that labor expenses can represent up to 95% of contact center costs. Conversational AI is already reducing those costs by automating low-level, repetitive inquiries and freeing human agents to focus on complex or sensitive interactions. But the challenge lies in striking the right balance between automation and the human touch, particularly when customers expect personalized service. But the challenge lies in striking the right balance between automation and the human touch, particularly when customers expect personalized service.
Poorly implemented AI can lead to longer resolution times if customers have to repeat themselves or escalate issues to human agents. And as AI takes on more routine queries, the human agents who remain must be trained and upskilled to manage complex interactions.
Balancing the right number of properly skilled human agents — who are typically more costly — with outsourced teams and AI automation is a delicate balancing act that goes beyond the capabilities of spreadsheet-based planning.
The human factor in workforce planning
Managing a contact center workforce involves accounting for more than just call volumes and channel preferences. Human factors such as employee leave, absence and sickness, burnout, training, and scheduled time off can significantly affect service levels. A report by Cornell University professors found 87% of workers reported high or very high stress levels at their contact centers, and 77% reported high or very high personal levels of stress.
Burnout can be especially prevalent in high-stakes industries like financial services and healthcare, where agents deal with complex and emotionally charged customer interactions. During peak periods or crises, such as economic downturns or major health events, agents may become overwhelmed, leading to increased absenteeism and turnover — compounding the very staffing challenges leaders are trying to solve.
Break the spreadsheet status quo
In many contact centers, workforce planning is still managed using tens or even hundreds of spreadsheets. While familiar and accessible, spreadsheets are simply not designed for the dynamic, unpredictable demands of modern contact centers. They are slow, prone to human error, and vulnerable to security and version control issues, all of which result in inefficient planning.
One of the biggest drawbacks of spreadsheets is their inability to provide real-time data and actionable insights. Manually processing raw data and translating it into decisions is time-consuming. By the time a decision is made, it’s often based on outdated information. Spreadsheets also can’t accurately model future trends across multiple variables simultaneously, such as customer demand, agent availability, skills, and channel performance.
Transform staff and customer experience with the Anaplan Contact Center Planning application
The Anaplan Contact Center Planning application is purpose-built to address the challenges above. It provides real-time visibility into current and forecasted contact center capacity, assessed against existing and projected workforce supply — and unlike tactical workforce management tools or spreadsheets, it stays in sync with your finance and HR plans.
With a standardized, out-of-the-box approach that’s configurable to your business, the application enables contact center and operations leaders to forecast customer interaction volume across all channels, optimize sourcing strategies, and make resource allocation decisions that improve customer retention, brand loyalty, and service level attainment.
With Anaplan, your team can experience:
1. Real-time data integration
Pull data from multiple sources including your workforce management (WFM), HCM/HR, finance, sales and operations, and other systems to make informed decisions on staffing and resource allocation based on current conditions, not outdated projections.
2. Predictive analytics
Leverage historical data to forecast call volumes, seasonal trends, and demand spikes, ensuring adequate staffing even during unpredictable periods. Better understand the impact of events on incoming contact volumes so you can minimize over- and understaffing.
3. Scenario modeling and "what-if" analysis
Model and compare various staffing strategies, such as reallocating agents or increasing the use of outsourced staff or AI, to promptly assess the potential impact on headcount, costs, and productivity KPIs. Model the cases and activities that could be handled by different agents to maximize efficiency and meet or exceed the 80/20 service level rule.
4. BPO optimization
Optimize the workforce with the ideal mix of employees and agency contractors. Compare BPO cost and performance metrics to better understand trade-offs on enhancing customer service and reducing expenses.
5. Upskilling and development
Accurate forecasting allows managers to incorporate time for ongoing training, helping agents handle complex inquiries while enhancing job satisfaction, performance, and improving staff retention rates.
Be a force for transformation
Contact center leaders face a unique set of challenges that are even more difficult to manage with outdated tools. While spreadsheets are a familiar tool, easy to access and have served a purpose, they are increasingly insufficient for the complex demands of modern contact centers.
By advancing to a purpose-built workforce capacity planning solution like the Anaplan Contact Center Planning application, leaders can overcome these challenges, improve staffing allocation, reduce wait times and costs, and ultimately elevate the customer experience — helping retain clients and maintain a competitive edge.
