Why are staffing requirements higher or lower than expected?

Workforce management can predict a higher or lower than expected staffing requirements for various reasons. See the following possible causes.

Higher than expected staffing requirement

Note: You can use the intraday monitoring view to investigate items 1–4.
  1. Over forecast volume.
  2. Over forecast average handle time.
  3. Schedule adherence is historically abysmal.
  4. The configured service goals (SL/SLO, ASA, Abandonment rate) are more vigorous than what historically was achieved. Also, workforce management tries to meet the service goal at every interval and not at a less granular period; for example, a day or week.
  5. Some agents may not belong to the selected business unit, but do handle some of that business unit’s volume. These agents are not directly known and therefore largely ignored for consideration on staffing requirement impact.
  6. Deferred work (for example, email) exists, and the maximum occupancy for deferred work is set to a value that is significantly lower than the default setting of 95%. For example, a low maximum occupancy value means less time to work on deferred work.
  7. Queues, media types, languages, and skills configurations that end in many low volume route paths can drive up staffing requirements. You can achieve greater economies of scale with lower optimal staffing when the interaction requirements and agent capabilities are more homogenous. If either or both of these requirements and capabilities are more heterogenous, then the issue of small numbers arises to a greater and greater degree. The more extreme that your configurations are, the greater the likelihood of non-optimal staffing requirements.

Lower than expected staffing requirement

Note: You can use the intraday monitoring view to investigate items 1–3.
  1. Under forecast volume.
  2. Under forecast average handle time.
  3. The configured service goals (SL/SLO, ASA, Abandonment rate) are less vigorous than what historically was achieved.
  4. Some agents in the selected business unit may handle another business unit’s volume. The loss of productivity is not directly known and therefore largely ignored for consideration on staffing requirement impact.
  5. Deferred work (for example, emails) exists, and the maximum occupancy for deferred work is set to an unrealistic value that is higher than the default of 95%.