Video: Why Your Forecasters Should Always Talk to Marketing

In this instalment of our video series exploring what you need to know about forecasting, and what they won’t tell you, Call Centre Helper’s Jonty Pearce explains why you need to correlate marketing activities when forecasting.

#6 Correlate Marketing Activities

Another technique that is very useful in forecasting is to correlate marketing activity. For instance, what we see here is we look at two weeks:

Week one has this profile, a typical profile that starts higher on a Monday, tails off towards the end of the week, and drops down on Saturday and Sunday.

And what you see here is the second week where you’ve mailed out 45,000 brochures, and the number of calls into the call centre increases following that mailing hitting people. That tails off for a couple of days, and then it sort of returns to normal.

So what you can do is you can actually work out how many extra calls that generated, and you can divide that by the 45,000, and you can work out how many calls you get per 1,000 brochures.

And then you can apply this and say next week we’re going to put out, say, 30,000 brochures. You can then factor in for whenever that goes through, a call arrival profile based on those brochures.

And that can be very useful to correlate marketing activity, and certainly one of the big unknown factors in what’s happening within the contact centre is what marketing are doing.

And I’d encourage you to speak with your marketing colleagues to get as much early visibility of when they’re sending out mailings, either physical post, or typically through sending emails out to customers.

For more in this series watch these videos next:

• If It’s a Forecast – It’s Wrong
• Getting Started With Forecasting
• Is Overhang Distorting Your Staffing Calculations?

Author: Jonty Pearce
Reviewed by: Robyn Coppell