Workforce planning

Workforce planning focuses on determining the number and type of employees needed to meet your service goals and skill requirements. These requirements can be applied to staffing profiles, which are a type of schedule template or profile defined for a certain type of employee with specific skills and a work pattern.

The scheduling process uses real schedules and forecasts to determine the number of employees required to meet the goals of any given scheduling period. The number of required employees can be the total required to staff a contact center or a campaign from scratch. It can also be the number of new employees an organization needs to add to its current staffing.

To fill the gap between actual employees and required employees, create staffing profiles. You can then add the staffing profiles to a scheduling period and include them when you generate the schedule. Upon schedule generation, the system converts the staffing profiles to phantom schedules. You can then assign a phantom schedule to actual employees, or convert an employee schedule to a phantom schedule.

Staffing profiles

You can use staffing profiles to evaluate alternative staffing plans and project future staffing needs.

Use staffing profiles to:

Provide a basic headcount plan - incremental to current staff

You can do a blue sky type analysis of how many people are needed for different forecasts and different service goals. The scheduling engine can schedule both actual employees and staffing profiles together.
Provide fixed schedules for current staff

Some companies operate with employees on fixed schedules, because there are specific times that the employees are unavailable to work.

In determining how many extra employees are needed for the future, current employees need to be considered when planning for future staffing needs. To figure this out, add phantom schedules to your existing employee schedules. The additional phantoms enable you to determine the new set of schedules for which employees can be hired, leaving existing employee schedules intact.
Determine outsourcing needs

Many companies consider the addition of an outsourcer to help meet peak volumes. By scheduling its current employees along with staffing profiles, managers can determine how many employees outsourcers can hire and at which times.

Using staffing profiles for outsourcers is useful to help offload needs during drastic seasonal changes. In addition, it helps outsourcers determine who they need to staff a future campaign. It also helps them predict staffing costs so that a more accurate bid can be submitted to customers.
Create schedules for shift bidding

Staffing profiles can be used to create schedules that are placed in auctions. As employees bid and receive shifts, real employees replace the profiles.

Staffing profiles become phantom schedules

When you select to include staffing profiles when you generate the schedule (by the Employees to schedule parameter), the system converts the staffing profiles to phantom schedules. You can then determine which phantom schedules to include in the schedule, assign them to employees, or convert employee schedules to phantoms.