A slow decision is no decision
Decisions quickly and accurately handles several key contact centre planning steps. The service can forecast all important planning metrics, simulate plans to accurately determine how many agents you need week-over-week, and develop highly efficient just-in-time hiring and overtime plans to optimally use your labor pool. Decisions also rolls capacity planning into an accurate budget. Here’s a look at how each of these features can benefit your contact centre.
Forecasting
Advanced features support planning and analysis for multi-skilled agents, multichannel servicing (email, chat, casework and outbound phone), as well as forecasting and planning for customer
experience metrics. Decisions will bring new capabilities to your planning and analysis team. We start with your historical contact centre data and automate data capture. There’s no need to manually collect time-critical performance data from sources all over the company. Data mart consolidates your performance data from phone, email, chat and casework contact management systems, as well as from workforce management, staffing and other systems. Decisions also stores and analyses data from cost and revenue reporting applications for detailed financial analysis. This means that historical and planned call volume, staffing, shrinkage and financial data are available in one place.
Requirement simulation and capacity optimisation
With the simulation feature of Decisions, you can accurately predict the number of agents required based on the average speed of answer, service level or abandon rate goals. Simulation considers how multi-skilled agents, routing efficiency, schedule adherence and scheduling efficiency affect customer behavior for each contact type. Using a spreadsheet to plan new-hire classes will seem like an outdated method after using the just-in-time hiring, overtime and leave staffing features in Decisions.
Decisions makes sure agent capacity is available when needed. You will know precisely when, where and how many agents to hire—and when to offer unpaid leave or overtime. Give your organisation the direction it needs to drive down costs and consistently achieve service and customer experience goals over the course of your planning year.
Use controllable shrinkage to schedule vacation, meetings, coaching and training times to fill workload gaps or address shortages in staffing—from weekly to annually. Planning these activities can reduce the need for new hires, overtime or unpaid leave.
Powerful what-if analysis
The contact centre is critical to the success of your competitive strategy. Decisions gives you the information you need to successfully execute a contact centre strategy—whether you want to be the low-cost provider, the upscale brand or the service leader. Evaluating the cost, customer experience and risk profiles of multiple service goals, cost goals and operating strategies means that operations can be more efficient. You can assign contact volume, staff growth and investment dollars by channel, site, agent group or outsourcer to drive costs, customer satisfaction and resources.
Decisions enables you to understand all possible options and select the best one. Management can understand key tradeoffs to any business decision and know the relationship between key performance drivers, such as call volume and average handle time versus financial and operational performance (average speed of answer, cost per call and revenue). You can then use this information to make the right decisions.
Executives can proactively manage operational risk and be ready with a range of plans that cover all potential scenarios. Decisions will help you understand how many agents are needed before a new marketing event occurs and how to reduce business reputation risk if contact volume or average handle time trends are unfavorable.
Most what-if questions lead to more questions. Decisions enables you to answer sophisticated what-if questions, such as what the cost and service repercussions will be to operations when internal or external changes occur. Analysts can handle critical executive questions and analysis challenges in minutes. Imagine if you could answer high-level, what-if questions in the board room during your next critical business meeting.
Decisions also enables you to create unlimited what-if analysis scenarios and see the positive or negative changes they have on your plan. Just vary any parameter, such as contact volumes, attrition, hourly wages or call-routing strategies, and immediately see the effect your changes have on agent occupancy, hiring schedules, service quality, costs, sales, profit and other measures. Decisions includes interactive sensitivity analysis features that detail relationships among key inputs and outputs of your plans. For example, you can plot call volume versus service level to highlight where plans are most sensitive to external events. By knowing how events will affect your plan, you can develop corrective management actions in advance—and turn potential crises into opportunities.
Budgeting
Decisions final step rolls all planning scenarios into a budget that enables analysts, operations teams and senior management to make effective decisions that impact your business. The process take minutes and empowers your company to make ongoing decisions.
Get results from the start
Decisions is simple to implement and is available on-premise or in the cloud. Use it to drive business value and ROI with first capacity and staffing plans. The service frees up Analysts to do what they are supposed to do: Create high-value, relevant analyses that support critical corporate decisions. They can spend time planning, instead of gathering data or finding errors in spreadsheets.
