Call Center Strategic Planning

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 06/15/2010 - 07:48
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Advanced Decision Support and Financial Planning

Achieving day-to-day call center performance goals requires a sound approach for strategic planning, budgeting and operational analysis. You need to understand future requirements in detail, be able to quickly evaluate and choose between alternative plans, and produce thorough budgetary reports and backup documents to secure needed resources. With integrated Personnel Planner and CenterBridge call center strategic planning tools, you can accurately predict and plan for the long-term success of your operation.
Planning and analysis capabilities in NICE IEX Workforce Management provide a sound basis for extending the horizon of your planning process from months to years. Companies use the data to assess how changes in contact volumes, service goals, staffing levels or other parameters affect their call center operations. The Personnel Planner tool provides additional functionality to generate effective hiring plans and staffing budgets to meet your long-term needs.
 
For the most advanced call center strategic planning and budgeting, NICE provides integrated forecasting, staff planning, budgeting and analysis to accurately predict the real-world performance of your call center using patent-pending, discrete event-simulation technology.
 
CenterBridge complements NICE IEX Workforce Management by offering enhanced call center strategic planning and analysis capabilities to identify:
 
  • the right service levels and performance goals to maximize profit.
  • if and when it makes sense to hire more agents or use overtime.
  • effects on average speed of answer (ASA), service level and abandonment rates if call volumes or staffing levels change.
  • the true cost of shrinkage— the time lost to vacation, breaks, etc.
NICE IEX Workforce Management Personnel Planner provides call center strategic planning tools that model the arrival and handling of each contact based on your unique queuing, routing and workflow strategies. Thus, it delivers unsurpassed accuracy and performance compared to Erlang-based spreadsheets, mathematical analysis tools and standalone simulation systems.
 
CenterBridge empowers you to make smart, informed decisions as well as create accurate, weekly, monthly and yearly plans for your contact center network. With CenterBridge, you can:
 
  • Reduce agent staffing costs by three to five percent through more accurate long-term requirements generation and more efficient hiring, overtime and leave plans.
  • Reduce the time spent on forecasting, planning, budgeting and analysis by 50 percent or more.
  • Quickly answer previously impossible "what-if" and impact analysis questions.
  • Improve the yield on your capital expenditure budget with better contact center investment decisions.
  • Reduce errors associated with multiple, linked spreadsheet models.
  • Improve your management's confidence in your call center planning process.
The NICE IEX Workforce Management system’s planning functions extend your forward vision from months to years, automatically applying trends from your historical performance. You can easily identify the best weeks for training or critical weeks when vacation time may need to be limited. Analyze the effects of business changes using “what-if” scenarios to determine the impact on requirements and performance if service levels, growth rates or other parameters change. If a new service or product line is expected to increase call handling time, the system can help you quickly find out whether your service level will be impacted. Use the integrated Personnel Planner to help develop an effective hiring plan and staffing budget to meet your future needs.
 
With CenterBridge, you can easily develop and distribute weekly, monthly, yearly and multi-year planning scenarios that accurately forecast the impact of changes in key performance drivers on your contact center's service quality, staffing requirements and financial results. For each scenario, CenterBridge delivers budget-ready hiring plans, financial forecasts, service quality projections and detailed risk analyses. CenterBridge has these standard modules:
 
  • Scenario Viewer
  • Sensitivity Analyzer
  • Staff Optimizer
  • Extra Time/ Under Time Optimizer
  • Trend Analyzer

 

CenterBridge has these optional modules:

 

  • Multi-skill
  • eComm
  • Outbound
  • Processing
  • Outsourcer

 

Strategic Planning