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Mark Alpern

Should capacity planning be a collaborative activity?

Capacity planning involves multiple stakeholders across various departments and functions working together to assess, forecast, allocate, and manage resources effectively. So it is important that it is a collaborative activity. It is a strategic and iterative process that will ensure your contact center has the necessary resources and capabilities to meet its operational and strategic goals.

Team meeting

But using Excel spreadsheets for capacity planning is inefficient, time-consuming, and error-prone. It makes it difficult to maintain version control when sharing files between different stakeholders.


Cinareo reduces risk and maximizes efficiencies by allowing stakeholders to experiment with different scenarios together and share capacity plans between team members easily to maintain “one version of the truth”. With formulas that address multiple data points embedded in the software, stakeholders can build highly accurate plans and detailed budgets with the confidence that their plans are fully optimized.


Here is how Cinareo can help with collaborative capacity planning:


1. Assessment: Contact centers start by assessing their current capacity in terms of personnel, equipment, technology, and other resources. This involves evaluating the existing capabilities, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the current utilization levels of various resources.


2. Forecasting: Collaborative capacity planning also requires contact centers to forecast future demands and needs. This involves analyzing historical data, market trends, customer demands, and other relevant factors to project the future work volumes, handle times and other factors that translate to forecasted resource requirements.


3. Stakeholder Involvement: A critical aspect of collaborative capacity planning is involving all relevant stakeholders within the organization. This includes representatives from different departments such as operations, finance, human resources, IT, and more. Each department provides input and insights related to their specific resource requirements. Cinareo provides a single source of the truth to be shared among departmental stakeholders.


4. Resource Allocation: Based on the assessment and forecasting, contact centers allocate resources in a manner that aligns with their strategic objectives. This may involve adjusting staffing levels, investing in new technology, expanding infrastructure, or reallocating budgets.


5. Scenario Planning: Collaborative capacity planning must include scenario planning. Contact centers consider various "what-if" scenarios to prepare for different outcomes. For example, they may plan for both rapid growth and economic downturns to ensure flexibility and resilience within their workforce.


6. Continuous Monitoring: It is critical to remember that capacity planning is not a one-time event but an ongoing process. Contact centers should continually monitor and assess their resource utilization, adjusting as needed based on changing circumstances and feedback from stakeholders.


7. Communication and Coordination: Effective communication and coordination among different departments are crucial for successful capacity planning. Cross-functional teams work together to ensure that resource allocation aligns with the organization's goals and objectives.


8. Technology and Tools: Many organizations use Cinareo to facilitate collaborative capacity planning, to help automate data analysis, support scenario modeling, and provide insights into resource utilization, cost per interaction, and other key performance indicators.


9. Risk Management: Collaborative capacity planning also involves identifying and mitigating risks associated with resource constraints. Contact centers need to have contingency plans in place to address unexpected resource shortages or disruptions. Cinareo helps with risk management, too.


10. Feedback and Improvement: After implementing resource allocation decisions, organizations gather feedback and data to assess the effectiveness of their capacity planning strategies. Lessons learned are used to refine and improve future planning processes.


Collaborative capacity planning is a holistic approach to ensure that a contact center has the right resources in the right place at the right time to meet its operational needs and strategic objectives.


By involving various stakeholders and maintaining a dynamic, adaptive approach, contact centers can enhance their resilience and competitiveness in a rapidly changing business environment.



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Cinareo can help you understand your specific shrinkage factors and use them as input into the capacity planning process.

Cinareo complements any WFM platform and sets a new standard for strategic and tactical capacity planning and decision support for multi-channel contact center environments.




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