What is scenario planning?
Scenario planning is a process used by many customer support teams to prepare for any eventuality and make business decisions.
Often referred to as 'what if?' analysis, scenario planning is generally focused around your forecasted contact volumes and staffing. Planners will experiment with changing one of multiple variables to understand what the impact would be. For example:
What would happen if our contact volumes increase 30% this month because of a new release?
What would happen if we cancel our temporary staff contracts and the team reduces by 10 people?
How much would our backlog grow by if we put 80% of everyone's time on live channels?
What tools does Dialpad WFM offer?
Dialpad WFM has a dedicated scenario planning tool within the forecasting page.
Go to your forecast page and click the 'test a scenario' button in the top-right corner.
In the scenario planning page you can experiment with the impact that changing variables can have on contact volumes, required staffing and backlogs.
Getting to know the page
The toolbar on the left contains all of the variables you can change to build your scenario, including which queues you would like to include in your test. Read more about that below.
You can select the time period you are planning for in the top toolbar. You can also select if you would like to see the data broken down per hour (when viewing up to 2 days at a time), or per day.
The first module provides information about any predicted impact to your backlog. Note: this is only available if you've entered a team size.
The agents needed module shows you the number of agents required to meet your SLAs based on the forecasted contact volumes, AHT and SLAs in this test.
The inbound contacts volumes module shows you the expected contact volumes in this period. By default, this is pulled from your forecast but you can manually adjust the volumes in the left hand toolbar (1).
Creating a scenario: Using variables
The left-hand toolbar is where you build your scenario. Every time you change a variable in the form, the backlogs, staffing and contact volume modules will adjust to reflect your changes.
You can choose to change only of of these variables, or all of them. It's totally up to you.
Step 1: Set the scene
Queues: Select the queues you want to include in this plan. You may want to understand the impact of turning off a channel during peak time, or moving from a combined inbox to a tiered inbox.
Contact volumes: If you're expecting your contact volumes to change, you can manually increase or decrease them by entering a percentage. To lower your contact volumes, just add a minus to the start, e.g. -25%
FTE agents: To understand the impact staffing has on backlogs, enter the expected number of full time equivalent agents you expect to have available during this period.
You can edit the hours per day, week and month by clicking the 'set FTE hours' button below the input.
💡 This can be helpful when planning hiring or outsourced team allocation.
Step 2: Plan your team's time
Account for shrinkage: When planning, understanding your shrinkage is key to avoiding unexpected understaffing. You can choose to enter a whole % amount or click 'per type' to break it down by type.
We recommend thinking about both your external shrinkage (e.g. time off, sickness, public holidays) and internal shrinkage (e.g. offline time, training, meetings)
Estimate backlogs: As well as planning for shrinkage, you also need to know how time will be split. This section lets you juggle the trade-off between time on. live channels (e.g. phones, live chat) and async channels (e.g. email, messaging). Enter the % of time that will be spent on each category and view the impact it can have on your backlogs.
💡 This can be helpful when working on new activity plans or scheduling goals.
Step 3: Adjust your targets
Average handle times: Whether you're expected your AHT to increase, e.g. because of a new AI tool handling easier contacts, or to decrease, e.g. because of investment in a new tool or improved training, you can understand the impact by using this field. To predict faster AHT, just add a minus to the start, e.g. -10%.
Target response times: If you're targeting a faster response time or relaxing your goals during peak times, you can model that using this field. To predict a faster response time, just add a minus to the start, e.g. -10%.
% responded to within target (SLA): Finally, you can choose to tweak your goal for the amount of contacts that should meet your SLA.
💡 This can be helpful when setting your KPIs and metrics for the next quarter, making trade-offs in peak time, or understanding the ROI a new tool could offer.