By Karen Elliott, CEO/Cofounder, Cinareo AI is starting to show up more in workforce management and capacity planning. As new capabilities emerge, it is clear that the industry is exploring how these technologies can enhance planning workflows in practical ways. This is an exciting development. At the same time, capacity planning sits in a unique category of decision-making, one where precision, transparency, and repeatability are essential. Planning models inform real-world

Small changes rarely break a plan. It is how they accumulate and surface that creates the real problem. The plan did not fail overnight. It stopped holding quietly. Nothing obvious broke. Forecasts were still within range. Staffing looked reasonable. Service levels had not collapsed. On paper, everything still appeared under control. But something had shifted. A small change in demand. A slight increase in handling time. A hiring delay that did not seem urgent at the time. In

Capacity planning often looks solid on paper, yet breaks down when real-world pressures are applied. As complexity increases, timelines compress, and executive scrutiny intensifies, many organizations find their planning outputs no longer inspire confidence or hold up when decisions matter most. This session brings together executive and practitioner perspectives to examine why capacity planning struggles in practice and how experienced leaders respond. Rather than focusing o

A practical discussion on why workforce plans fail in execution and how standardizing processes brings control and predictability back to operations. What You'll Learn Even the best workforce plans can fail in execution. Forecasts are accurate, spreadsheets look sound, yet service levels still slip and teams end up firefighting. In this webinar, Cinareo’s Mark Alpern and industry advisor Daniel Piper explore why this happens and how standardized workforce management pract

A leader-level discussion on uncovering the hidden risks in your staffing plans, cost forecasts, and service commitments. What You'll Learn Shrinkage is one of the most influential drivers of contact center performance, yet it is often treated as a single, blended assumption. For senior leaders, this simplification quietly introduces risk into staffing plans, cost forecasts, and service commitments. When assumptions don’t match reality, the gap creates immediate exposure: sta

Most contact center leaders believe they understand their labor model. Headcount is approved. Salaries are budgeted. Capacity is forecasted. And underneath it all sits a quiet assumption: 40 paid hours equals 40 productive hours. That assumption deserves scrutiny. As Mark Alpern , Co-Founder and COO at Cinareo, explained, “ When we talk about shrinkage, it’s really a generic term for non-productive time… it is as simple in principle, but complex in execution. ” The complexity

By Mark Alpern, COO, Cinareo. This article reflects patterns we see repeatedly when reviewing real-world staffing models across contact center environments. In many of these environments, the largest source of staffing error is not forecast accuracy, but how abandonment and retries are treated, or ignored, in the underlying model. Despite decades of technological change in contact center operations, Erlang-based staffing models remain the de facto standard for determining f

By Karen Elliott, CEO, Cinareo. In capacity planning software, complexity has become a proxy for credibility. It seems like more exposed variables and more buttons and functions sends the message: if it’s complicated, it must be accurate. After years of building a planning system, I’ve come to believe the opposite. Complexity is the easiest thing to promote. Clarity is the hard part. And when complexity becomes the interface, planning slows, trust erodes, and decision-making

Shrinkage remains one of the most misunderstood yet impactful metrics in contact center management. While often viewed as a simple Workforce Management (WFM) percentage, miscalculating it leads to significant inefficiencies that affect customer experience, employee engagement, and financial performance

Key Insights from Cinareo’s Recent Conversation with Industry Experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper This article is the fourth and final part in our series exploring key themes from Cinareo’s recent conversation with workforce planning experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper. Workforce plans often lose traction the moment they reach executive leadership. Not because the work was wrong, but because leaders are being asked to make decisions on information that does not clearly tran

Key insights from Cinareo’s recent conversation with industry experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper This article is the third in a four-part series exploring key themes from Cinareo’s recent conversation with workforce planning experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper. Workforce plans rarely break because the work was done poorly. They break when decisions made after the plan slowly pull operations in a different direction. Not all at once, but through small, everyday choices that

Key insights from Cinareo’s recent conversation with industry experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper This article is the second in a four-part series exploring key themes from Cinareo’s recent conversation with workforce planning experts Mark Alpern and Daniel Piper. Most workforce plans do not fail because the forecast was wrong. They fail because something changed after the plan was set, and no one saw the impact early enough. By the time results start to drift, the decision