An Executive Brief on the Platform Choice Behind Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and Cost, by Mark Alpern. For twenty years, contact center capacity planning has been treated as a tactical spreadsheet exercise, a calculation run by a single planner to keep service levels on target. Today, it governs the largest variable cost line on most service-business P&Ls and shapes outcomes across customer experience, employee experience, and operating cost. Yet, the platforms most enterprises...

Every few years the pitch comes back, polished and self-assured: one platform for everything. Routing, IVR, quality management, analytics, workforce management, all behind a single login, a single contract, a single throat to choke. It is a seductive offer, and honestly so. Inte gration is expensive. Vendor management is tedious. The promise that one stack could absorb all of it has real gravity. But gravity is not the same as truth. The clause nobody reads The all-in-one promise carries a...

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 frontline capacity...