(Have you upgraded to Community Enterprise? View the forecasting and scheduling guide for Community Enterprise).
This guide walks you through the forecasting and scheduling process in Essentials version 5.x and assumes that setup has been fully completed and you are ready to use Essentials. To review setting up Essentials, visit the Essentials Setup Guide.
Forecasting
Processing a forecast in Essentials is quick! Essentials will look through your company’s history of contact volume and average handle time (AHT), using the forecast profiles established during setup to determine which weeks to use.
This section assumes that you have a valid forecast profile set to ’Default.’
To get started, go to the Forecast tab and select Published forecast.
The published forecast represents the official forecast for the organization. All forecast reports, including intraday, will compare actual collected Contacts and AHT to the forecast you have generated.
By default, the published forecast displays today’s forecast. If you have not generated a forecast for the current date, it will be blank.
Once generated you can click tabs at the top to view reports for Staffing Requirements (hours), Contact Volume, or Average Handle Time.
Quick Forecast
To create a forecast for a new date range, click Perform a quick forecast link in the blue tile. In the pop-up, enter a date range then click Generate to create a quick published forecast for a selected date range using forecast defaults. When complete, click Dismiss to view the new forecast.
The quick forecast will run for the selected date range using your default forecast profile created during the setup process.
Revise Published Forecasts
Revision options include by Interval, Daily, Weekly and Monthly totals for contact volume, handle time, and staffing values for your published forecast. Additionally, Essentials will track each forecast revision in a revision history.
Revise specific intervals.
1. Choose an Activity.
2. Enter the date you wish to modify.
3. Enter a required Comment about the revision then click Next.
4. Make the adjustments for each interval then Save.
Follow the same process to revise daily, weekly, or monthly contact volume/AHT.
Creating a Schedule
Now that you have created a forecast you can create a schedule for the forecasted week. When you click the Schedule tab, you will be able to create a working schedule then publish it to your agents.
This section assumes that your agents are properly configured, and a schedule templates in place.
Click Set up Working Schedules then Click here to create new working schedules.
- Choose the activity level.
- Enter a name (description optional).
- Leave the box checked to Automatically include a reference to this week’s published forecast.
- Click Next.
- Click Next again.
Select the week(s) for the working schedule by clicking on any day in the week. The dates populate in the table below. Click Next.
Click on either date link to open the working schedule worksheet with the Steps to Success.
If needed, you can customize the Custom Work habits & hours for an activity, review any pending events or exception requests, or select a different forecast to use when generating the schedule.
Click Generate optimized schedules. The system will verify the settings.
When all checks are green, click Generate Schedule to create work shifts for all agents in the site.
Select the level of schedule bias (minimizing staffing cost vs maximizing coverage) then click Go. This process may take a few minutes.
When finished, close the pop-up window.
Click Manage agent schedules in the left side navigation pane and select desired report options to review the schedules. Click Apply options to view the agents in the activity and their schedule for the week including break sets.
Modifying Working Schedules
You can easily manipulate agent schedules by clicking and holding a work event or off-phone event, then drag and drop it to the desired timeframe. You can make changes before or after publishing, however, it’s best practice to make edits prior to publishing.
Right clicking the schedule event name will give other edit options including—
- Edit the event
- Delete the event
- Create a new intraday event
- Convert work event to time off (for work events)
- Show Layered Schedule View
Right clicking on an agent’s name will give the option to
- Show the weekly schedule details
- Lock/Unlock schedule for day
- Create new work intervals
- Create a new intraday event
- Show layered schedule view
For example, selecting Create a new intraday event will take you to a screen where you choose the Request Type, Start Date, Start and End Times, and select whether to modify existing work hours. You can also apply a recurrence pattern if the event will occur on more than one day in the schedule.
Add a required comment.
If finished, click Save. If you would like to apply the event to additional agents, click Next.
Click OK in the pop-up to confirm that you want to make the change.
Click Finish and the new event will be on the schedule.
A layered schedule view allows seeing the events on separate lines. You can edit the same ways as in the published schedule view.
Reporting and Intraday Management
The Report tab includes most Essentials reports including:
- Review historical Contact Volume
- Review Published Forecasts
- Review Published Schedule for summary and analysis data
- Generate Intraday Analysis reports
- Generate real-time or historical Schedule Adherence reports
We recommend that you monitor intraday analysis and schedule adherence reports continuously every day.
Intraday Analysis
Go to Report > Intraday analysis > Intraday performance monitor.
The Intraday Performance Monitor will compare Actuals vs Forecasted for Contact Volumes, AHT, Staffing analysis, service analysis, up to the most recent interval (15 min). It will also reforecast the remainder of the day for all datasets, allowing Community to project revised staffing needs throughout the day.
These interactive reports have tabs to select different sets of data.
Schedule Adherence
Are your agents adhering to their schedules? The Schedule Adherence report can show you.
The schedule adherence menu includes the daily schedule adherence for the current day, up to the minute real-time adherence alerts, and historical adherence, available at the enterprise model level or by supervisor.
Daily schedule adherence
Go to Report > Schedule adherence > Daily schedule adherence > Enterprise model (or supervisor tree)
Daily schedule adherence shows each agent’s adherence for today (in a color-coded circle) and the third line on the schedule shows adherence details for the day. Hover over an event to view the details.
Clicking the > next to an agent’s name allows viewing additional adherence details for the schedule.