To achieve client satisfaction and other key performance measures, contact centers must meet work demand across all front and back-office channels. If there is not enough capacity to meet demand, this can lead to lost sales, poor service levels, and overworked staff. Conversely, too much capacity leads to wasted resources and higher operating costs.
What can capacity planning do for you?
1. It can help ensure that resources are available when needed
By planning ahead and hiring ahead of requirement, as well as monitoring utilization, capacity planning can help ensure that the right resources are available when they are needed. This is important for day-to-day operations and even more so for seasonal peaks and unplanned events.
2. It can improve resource utilization
By monitoring agent occupancy and utilization to plan, and making real-time adjustments as needed, capacity planning can help improve agent occupancy and utilization, which can lead to cost savings and improved operating performance.
3. It can help reduce costs
By optimizing resources, capacity planning can help reduce costs. By avoiding over-provisioning of resources, call center can save expenses on salaries, recruitment and training, facilities, and hardware/software.
Capacity management is crucial for contact centers for optimizing resources to meet work volumes while minimizing operating costs.
The impact of inaccurate capacity planning
Capacity planning requires you to juggle many moving pieces to get your plan right the first time. The goal is to strive to be as accurate as possible in the determination of the workload and workforce, meet service level objectives, achieve optimal agent productivity, and maximize customer and employee satisfaction.
But what if you get it wrong?
Failure to get capacity planning right can yield heavy costs for organizations – overstaffing and understaffing can negatively affect the contact center in tangible and intangible ways.
Costs of understaffing | Costs of overstaffing |
Poor customer service | Financial impact |
Missed service levels | Inefficient resource utilization |
Lost revenues | Bored workers |
Agent burnout | |
Capacity planning drives the customer and employee experience; failing to correctly capacity plan may mean losing clients and staff.
Neglecting customer experience means losing clients:
• Customers prioritize customer service over cost, a key influencer in purchasing decisions
• Price alone does not drive brand loyalty and customers will talk with their feet if dissatisfied
Neglecting employee experience means losing staff:
• Understaffing means higher occupancy and productivity expectations leading to burnout
• Longer client wait times means irate clients impacting employees
If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, will you have time to do it over again?
Cinareo™ can help you do capacity planning right, the first time, every time.