SEASONAL GROWTH AND DEMAND

Industry Content Supporter:
Samantha Hansen
Director of Workforce Development and Career Pathways
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samanthahansenleal

Many products and services are not in demand all year round, or they might be available only during a specific period, like the Affordable Care Act, which has open enrollment from November 1st to January 31st. The holiday season creates extra demand for many products; a large grocery chain beefs up staff to take online and phone orders six weeks before Christmas.

Seasons are diverse and create many challenges for contact centers servicing seasonal products. Challenges, for example, are idling agents and fixed costs that must be paid. Seasonal products have a demand pattern, and studying the patterns can provide insights and predictions into demand cycles. These cycles help you determine how to staff the contact center for profitability.

Demand is not always a controllable factor; it varies in every situation and industry. Demand can be positive and negative, impacting the call volume in the contact center. Too many agents on hand are just as costly as too few.

Negative demand can be a reaction to a new product and may show that consumers are unaware of its features and benefits. Marketing will need to regroup its efforts. In the meantime, when there is no demand or negative demand, you will want to deploy agents elsewhere or use a workforce management tool to reschedule agents for other projects. Demand may not be controllable, but it can be managed.

It costs as much to recruit part-time agents as a full-time agent, but sometimes you can’t find enough full-time agents. Perhaps by changing the hiring strategy, you can hire more skilled part-timers, and they can become your seasonal team. There are people you only work with during the holidays, if you find good part-timers, invite these agents back year after year. Take care of them just as you would your full-time staff.

At-home agents are another workaround to seasonal demand. You can set up home agents using a hosted cloud-based contact center platform. They will need a computer with Internet access and a phone. The audio quality on softphones from home is usually less than good. Set up agents with a quality desk phone like a Polycom to ensure the best connection. Agents from home log in as if they were in the contact center and are ready to take calls.

Outsource Overflow to a Business Processor Outsourcer (BPO) – Do your due diligence on choosing a BPO before seasonal demand hits. Having one in your back pocket ready to go is good practice. Nothing is more irritating than the slow process of completing all the approvals and paperwork when you need extra help now. Plan.

Expand Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Self Service Options – By expanding IVR self-service options, you can reduce the number of calls for simple tasks like checking balances, making payments, tracking shipments, making a reservation, and more. IVRs are open 24/7 making it easy for customers to use. IVRs reduce staff for off-peak hours and holidays and can help when call volumes are high, as an option to a live agent. Consider using IVRs to automate simple repetitive calls. It will free up live agents to handle more complex issues.

Forecasting demand is just as much an art as a science. Forecasts are projections, not goals or objectives. They provide an expectation of the future based on facts, historical data, experience, and insight.

Step one is gathering the data. You want stacks of historical data. History is the best indicator of the future. The first place to check is your contact center platform. A robust platform will have historical reports stored for up to a year. If your platform emails or FTPs reports automatically, many managers save those reports. Seek out those managers. Can you get two years’ worth of data? Much more than two years isn’t relevant with the fast pace of change. Less than 12 months doesn’t represent the whole picture.

Next, thoroughly examine the data for anomalies. Seek out figures that appear unusually low or high and any missing values. Then, identify the underlying causes of this atypical data. For example, is the “zero” you observe due to a holiday when the contact center was closed? Does this holiday shift each year, such as July 4th, or does it fall on the same date annually, like Memorial Day, which is observed on the last Monday in May?

If July 4th moves from a Saturday to a Tuesday, how does that impact call volumes on the preceding and the following days? This is the “art” part of forecasting where your experience, intuition and judgment come into play. The data is factual but not consistently representative.

In this step, you want to “normalize” the data up or down. Let’s say the volume is easily 5,000 on Thursdays, but you notice that it is only 3,000 calls on the second Thursday. Further research shows that the contact center experienced a four-hour outage. Since that is not a typical Thursday event, you can assume that the contact center would have handled 5,000 calls without an outage. The actual number is correct, but you want to use 5,000 for forecasting purposes.

On the other hand, if the contact center completes mandatory compliance training every third Thursday, then the lower number is accurate and would be the correct number to use for forecasting. If the event is repeatable and predictable, these lower numbers are realistic.

The key is to determine what is causing the data aberration. You must answer that question.

Here are a few strategies and best practices for optimizing the agents' schedules for high demand and seasonal peaks.

— Flex Existing Schedules: All Hands on Deck! Adjust all schedules to accommodate a maximum shift. Ask part-time agents if they can work extra hours or even full-time during peak seasons. This can boost schedule hours as much as 6%.

— Schedule based on Performance: Reward agents who perform according to the schedules they prefer.

— Shift Mix: Filling in shifts with flexible part-time and split shift agents. To achieve optimal delivery a combination of shorter shifts durations in blocks of four-to-five hours, complement full-time staff. Use incentives like additional benefits to attract agents into split shifts. Offer higher vacation accrual, a four-day workweek, no weekends, or fewer weekends, those usually do the trick. This will reduce the amount of temporary part-time employees hired for the season, thus containing hiring costs.

— Flex Shifts: The workforce management tool clearly shows voluntary “go home” and overtime opportunities. Agents can self-schedule and adjust their schedules, giving them control. With a proper workforce management tool, u can change the workforce in as little as 24-48 hours without needing new agents.

No matter how hard you try to make it an accurate forecast, it won’t be perfect. If you get 98% accuracy from your forecast that’s a good day. It is an estimate, a prediction of the future. Ask how off your forecast is and why. Are you using a complex method when the simpler ones are more accurate? Complicated methodologies hide or make key assumptions that may not fit your business. Stick to simple techniques.

If you don’t trust the raw data, you can’t trust the forecast. The data quality is proportional to how often you use it, believe it, and correct it. When you use data regularly, you become familiar with its inaccuracies and can fix them. When you clean up the data, it becomes a powerful tool for forecasting, and therefore, you are more likely to trust it.

Bias also gets in the way of forecasts. Let’s face it, when you must make assumptions, it is difficult to eliminate the addition of some bias. Just be conscious that this happens.

Finally, technology doesn’t improve forecasting. Sound logic in your methodology creates a robust forecast. Technology is a tool that makes the method more efficient and, thus, more successful.