How chat concurrency works in workforce management

In Workforce Management (WFM), concurrency is addressed in the requirements generation process, not the forecasting process.

WFM captures historical volume and Average Handle Time (AHT) without adjusting for concurrency during the forecasting phase, but concurrency is factored in during requirement calculation. This means that the forecasted AHT includes time when agents were handling concurrent interactions. While the AHT aligns with what was historically observed, it can appear inflated due to overlap from concurrency.

When calculating staffing requirements during schedule generation and capacity planning, WFM removes the overlapping hold time from concurrent chat interactions when calculating the actual agent effort, effectively measuring focus time on chats. Over time, as actual concurrency rates change either based on volume changes or utilization settings updates, the staffing requirements calculation will adjust to predict the updated concurrency rates looking forward.

As a result, the staffing requirements represent the true workload, based on the historical concurrency rate, yielding the correct requirement needed based on the forecasted volume and AHT.