Staffing chat sessions
By Ger Koole In this blog I would like to discuss staffing in other situations than inbound. The Erlang formulas are commonly used for single-skill…
Which waiting time measure to choose: GoS or ASA?
By Ger Koole Recently somebody posted the following question on the Dutch linkedin group “plannersforum”: what is better: steering at Average Speed to Answer (ASA)…
What is the best achievable forecast accuracy?
By Ger Koole The WFM cycle starts with workload forecasting. A good forecast is the first step in good WFM: if the forecast is accurate,…
Erlang X
In 1917 a Danish mathematician named Agner Krarup Erlang first published his Erlang C formula giving mathematical insight into the fields of traffic engineering and…
The Importance of Real-Time Management to Workforce Management
1st World War German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke famously said “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy”. Likewise, “the best-laid workforce plan rarely…
Team scheduling or Individual Agent Scheduling? What works best?
Workforce Planning for contact centres, and especially scheduling is all about trade-offs. Every contact centre wants to reduce its bottom line, increase its productivity and…
Agent Workload Forecasts
I have previously talked about volume forecasting, and I think before I move on to other areas of workforce management such as Scheduling, Capacity planning…
Methods to Measure Forecast Error
The first rule of forecasting is that all forecasts are either wrong or lucky. However failing to learn from when your forecasting is wrong or…
Volume Demand Forecasting
The workforce planning forecasting process, like any planning process, is one-part art one-part science. It is an art because sometimes the accuracy of your forecast…