Top Tips for Capacity Planning to Meet Customer Demand

As the customer service landscape evolves, contact centres must adopt effective capacity planning techniques to meet demand and maintain customer satisfaction.

To find out the best ways to do this, we asked our panel of experts for their top tips and strategies for improving capacity planning.

Here’s what they said…

12 Top Tips to Improve Capacity Planning

1. Cross-Train Your Contact Centre Agents

A flexible workforce created through cross-training ensures agents can handle various customer situations as needed. This approach improves adaptability and reduces the need to overstaff.

Contributed by: Jonathan “Kenu” Escobedo, Customer Success Manager, Miarec

2. Account for Predictable and Unpredictable Demand

You have to account for both ‘predictable demand’ and ‘unpredictable demand’.

Predictable demand is relatively easy to plan for.

The first step is to determine when your contact volumes are going to peak, so start by looking at:

• any significant events, such as Christmas, that could boost demand
• analytical data that will show past peaks. A good call centre phone system will provide this.

Then arrange your shifts and staffing levels so that high demand doesn’t throttle your performance.

Unpredictable demand is harder. This is caused by things like service outages, global events, and even TikTok; one small business saw a 340% web traffic increase from a single viral video!

To meet unpredictable demand, you need radical levels of process flexibility. Businesses that build their contact centres this way can divert everyday enquiries to self-service, freeing agents to deal with the surge.

Contributed by: Pierce Buckley, CEO & Co-Founder, babelforce

3. Reflect How Annual Attrition Truly Fluctuates During Different Times of the Year

As with all forecasting work, it is crucial to communicate regularly with other areas of the business (e.g. marketing, finance etc.) and understand how their longer-term strategies will impact staffing requirements.

Your forecast must also reflect annual attrition, including internal attrition and shrinkage levels that represent how this truly fluctuates during different times of the year.

Contributed by: Scott Budding, Sales Engineering Manager, UK & EMEA, Calabrio

4. Use Machine Learning to Detect Long-Term Trends and Seasonal Patterns

Employees are the most important element of every organization. And the most basic thing you’ve got to get right is having the right number of them on the payroll.

You can’t hire and train people overnight, so it’s vital to always have a long-term capacity plan.

Well-run contact centres typically create staffing budgets for the coming fiscal year several months in advance.

Until recently, the forecasting module of most WFM software tools ran out of steam once you started looking more than a few months ahead. Capacity planning was based on a simple model based on monthly totals and simplifying assumptions.

Not any more! The best WFM software now generates accurate forecasts for two years ahead or more, using machine learning to detect long-term trends and seasonal patterns, while letting you build in business intelligence for known campaigns or other events and giving insights about required shifts.

Contributed by: Chris Dealy, WFM Evangelist, injixo

5. Create Scenarios to Demonstrate Stakeholder Impact

Engage with key stakeholders during the planning process, especially where their actions could impact demand (e.g. upcoming marketing campaigns) and use their insight to inform the plan.

One way to achieve this is to create scenarios to demonstrate the impact of higher or lower than predicted demand.

Just don’t do too many as it could overwhelm or bore people.

Contributed by: Paul Allen, Head of Customer Support at Department for Education

6. Remember Instinct and “Gut Feel” Are Important Balances to Your Data

If you don’t have the data you’d consider ideal, don’t give up or lock yourself in a data accusation circle that delays the delivery of the plan.

The truth is, where you have data you can often feel overly secure and miss the planned changes, thus you only predict a repetition of the past.

If you’re not confident in your data or assumptions, say so, even score it and challenge the audience to better it, but don’t say you can’t plan with what you have, because often you can.

Instinct and “gut feel” are important balances to your data, which if relied upon alone can lead you down dead ends.

Contributed by: Keith Stapleton, Director at Select Planning Ltd and Associate Consultant at The Forum

7. Offer Gig-Style Work Options to Temporarily Scale Your Team

Incorporate flexible scheduling during peak seasons.

If your workforce management (WFM) tools indicate an upcoming peak call season, consider offering gig-style work options to temporarily scale your team to meet demand.

This strategy also helps prevent overworking your full-time agents.

Contributed by: Jonathan “Kenu” Escobedo, Customer Success Manager, Miarec

8. Refresh Your Capacity Plan at Least Every 3 Months

Capacity planning is the process that typically looks from 3 months to 18–24 months ahead to create medium- and long-term plans for the total number of staff required for each department and service. Good practice is to refresh this at least every 3 months for the entire operation.

This breaks down into a number of components to then pull together an overall plan:

• Long-term FTE demand planning and supply planning at weekly/period level, used for cost forecasting and FTE budget planning, operating model considerations, recruitment and upskill strategy, and building capacity planning.
• Modelling and analysis of underlying customer contact volumes, demand drivers and customer propensities to identify trends, behaviours, and nuances in what drives demand into each function by trigger.
• Creation of enterprise planning for every department with customer functions, informed by data where possible, on overlays to future customer contact propensity by channel, seasonality, automation and change overlays, active customer shape and contact behaviours, customer recruitment, promotional activity and offers, product development for new features & services and (industry specific) the global sporting calendar.

Contributed by: Danny Gunn, Head of Workforce Planning at bet365

9. Start Having Discussions With Key Players Earlier in the Year

Most companies start planning in the summer. To avoid surprises, absolutely start having the discussions with the key players earlier in the year. This will ensure the plan is built in the right way or at least on the right track.

Your senior leaders may have a specific vision in mind of what it looks like, so take advantage of the time in the winter and spring. Then the planning season will be more about tweaking and less about building.

10. Put One Digit to the Right of the Decimal to Show You’re Looking Closely at the Maths

For FTE requirements, I like to put one digit to the right of the decimal. For example, let’s say your requirement is 85.4 agents. The decimal shows that you are looking closely at the maths and that the calculation is real.

That real perception adds a little more trust and confidence in the capacity planner’s work, but it also gives leaders an opportunity to round up (which they often do).

It allows leadership a bit of control from the very beginning of the planning phase. It’s a clever way for a capacity planner to say, “I’m super-proud and confident of this model, but I still value your opinion on how to use it.”

Contributed by: Bryce Ackerman, Workforce Management Internal Consultant at Roche

11. Be Prepared With Playbooks for Any Given Situation

It is highly recommended to work with different scenarios so that you can be prepared with playbooks (a documented collection of strategies, methods, and step-by-step processes that guide teams on how to handle specific tasks and scenarios).

This includes, but is not limited to, projected business growth rates, channel shift, etc.

Contributed by: Scott Budding, Sales Engineering Manager, UK & EMEA, Calabrio

12. Keep Things Simple to Get Key Stakeholders on Board

Agility is more important than complexity. Being able to align your capacity plan to the “hot topics” in the operational world will put it in the centre of any debate and decision-making process.

Detail is less important than speed of reply, but of course accuracy remains a must.

Don’t be tempted to add more detail if the audience doesn’t jump on board straight away. In fact, make things simpler to help them get on board. Then only look to add complexity where it adds value.

Contributed by: Keith Stapleton, Director at Select Planning Ltd and Associate Consultant at The Forum

What Are Your Top Tips for Capacity Planning?

Join our LinkedIn community and share your ideas.

For more great insights and advice from our panel of experts, read these articles next:

• Contact Centre Predictions for 2025
• Enhance FCR With Smart Routing
• The Superhuman Touch – How to Blend Agents and AI for Maximum Impact
• What Tech Should You Buy Next? Here’s How to Choose

Author: Robyn Coppell
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson