Workforce Forecasting Strategies to Optimize Your Headcount

One minute you think you’ve got enough agents manning the phones, then boom. You get an onslaught of incoming calls, and everybody struggles.

Sound familiar? It’s the reality of any call center or contact center that doesn’t have a formal workforce forecasting strategy.

The good news is that you’re not alone. The bad news is that it means you’re forever firefighting when unplanned events happen (or even planned ones if your best guess didn’t cut it).

What Is Workforce Forecasting and Why Does It Matter?

Workforce forecasting is the process of using historical data, analytics, and business intelligence to predict staffing needs in the long and short term. Using software — which is sometimes built into the contact center’s software — combined with artificial intelligence (AI), call centers can now accurately plan the number of employees, overflow agents, and backup plans for any given scenario.

This ensures the right people with the right skill sets are in the right roles at the right time. This, in turn, leads to customers getting routed to the right person in the shortest amount of time.

Benefits of effective workforce forecasting

The benefits of workforce forecasting can’t be understated. Making one change to your contact center can trigger a wealth of good for your business:

• Prevent overstaffing and understaffing: With improved operational efficiency, no agents are sitting without workloads or being overwhelmed with calls.
• Support strategic decision-making: Data backs your budget forecasting and hiring, and training plans.
• Align labor forecasting and allocation with customer demand: Strategic workforce planning accounts for seasonal trends and unplanned events.
• Provide visibility into skill gaps: Forecasting informs future training needs and highlights personnel who need more thorough development plans.
• Enhance agility during periods of market disruption: You can remain ahead of your competitors even when the stakes are highest.
• Improve employee satisfaction: Balanced workloads mean happier employees who are less prone to burnout.
• Reduce turnover and boost retention: When you address issues with burnout and overwork, your agents are less likely to seek alternative employment.

Core Elements of Workforce Forecasting

1. Historical data analysis

Being aware of what happened in the past allows you to best inform your “what’s next” scenario. Thanks to integration with CRM data, call center metrics, and HR systems, you can review trends in:

• Call volume and potential future demand
• Employee availability and attrition
• Average handle time and service level goals
• Past scheduling accuracy and shift adherence

2. Predictive analytics

By combining historical data with AI and machine learning, you can forecast several key contact center events:

• Peak traffic windows (e.g., Mondays at 10 a.m., holiday surges, unexpected business growth)
• Expected employee turnover based on tenure patterns
• Likelihood of absenteeism during flu season or high-stress periods
• Future labor costs tied to expansion or restructuring initiatives

3. Scenario planning

No two days are the same in a call center, but sometimes there are very different days from the ones you thought were going to happen. Workforce forecasting allows you to build models around different business goals and realities:

• Best case (around 10% increase in customer volume with a stable headcount)
• Worst case (sudden attrition spike and a surge in service tickets)
• Most likely (steady growth with seasonal fluctuations)

This allows your team to plan for non-standard events or disruptions, like product launches, system outages, or even economic downturns.

Key Forecasting Metrics to Monitor

Service level

Your call center’s service level is the percentage of calls answered within a target time frame. When your agents answer more calls during this period, the service level percentage increases. When your agents answer fewer calls, the service level percentage decreases.

For example, let’s say your agents are answering 80% of your calls in 30 seconds. A good service level is around the 80/20 mark, which means that 80% of your incoming calls get answered within 20 seconds.

Average handle time

Use average handle time to estimate workforce requirements based on the normal total time agents spend on customer interactions. This includes talk time, hold time, and any post-call (follow-up) time.

Agent utilization rates

Setting call center benchmarks for productivity most commonly revolves around the agent utilization rate.

This measures the percentage of logged-in time call center agents spend actively handling customer contacts during a given period.

Here’s the formula to measure this:

Agent Utilization Rate (%) = (Total Handled Call Time / Total Logged-in Time) x 100

Turnover rate (attrition rate)

Monitoring agent turnover rates and absenteeism trends gives you insight into how likely agents are to stay with your business. This is vital for long-term workforce forecasting, as you will need to hire and train agents in line with the number of agents exiting the business.

The average call center turnover rate can be up to 45%, and the pandemic only intensified this problem. High churn rates in call centers lead to a constant cycle of hiring and training, draining your resources, and impacting customer service quality.

Current workforce availability

Knowing the difference between actual vs. planned hours means you have a view of what genuine agent availability looks like. Just because you have 100 call center agents who work 40 hours per week, that doesn’t mean they’ll all show up to work on time and every day.

Customer satisfaction scores

There’s no point in having a set number of contact center agents available at any given time if that doesn’t translate to happy customers. Use customer satisfaction scores, gauged through automated surveys, to understand if your workforce forecasting correlates with customer experience. Use this data for workload correction where needed.

Forecast accuracy

Once you’ve undertaken your first round of forecasting, review your predictions vs. reality. You may have nailed it the first time. The data and the predictive analytics came together, and you have happy customers and good employee engagement levels.

It could need some fine-tuning. Check back for accurate staffing levels every time you change your forecast, and embrace continuous improvement.

A Note on Forecasting for Contact Centers

Forecasting in customer-facing teams goes beyond basic headcount.

Leaders must account for:

• Real-time spikes: Outage reports, billing days, unplanned events, natural disasters
• Agent competencies: Skill-based routing needs, self-service outsourcing, training, and upskilling requirements
• Shift variability and schedule preferences: Agents swap shifts and request time off
• Multichannel workloads: Some agents may handle chat, email, SMS, or social media as well as voice

Challenges to Accurate Workforce Forecasting

Even the best workforce forecasting software can underperform. If you feed it bad data, fail to share information across departments, or don’t change in line with external factors, you’re setting your software up to fail.

Poor data quality

Outdated or inconsistent workforce data leads to flawed forecasting models. Make sure you sanitize your customer and agent data before uploading it to a workforce management (WFM) tool or forecasting algorithm.

Organizational silos

When HR, operations, and contact center teams don’t collaborate, assumptions go unchecked. The biggest cause of future bad data is people not sharing the latest version or not making sure the right models are in use.

Rapid market changes

New tech, new customers, or new market trends can quickly disrupt long-range plans. If something is happening that isn’t the norm or you haven’t accounted for in your scenario planning, you must factor this into your forecasting for it to remain accurate.

Lack of real-time feedback

Without intraday management, forecasts can quickly become outdated. It’s not a one-and-done thing. That is, unless you want to go back to old habits (and bad forecasts). Embrace feedback from agents, customers, and systems to constantly improve forecasting accuracy and reduce staff shortages.

Ignoring human factors

Real-time feedback extends to elements outside of data and metrics. You must factor burnout, disengagement, and absenteeism into labor planning.

These attributes are often harder to spot in call center environments, especially when managing a remote workforce. Listening to agents’ direct feedback, as well as bullpen chatter, benefits agents, customers, and your forecasting.

What to Look for in Workforce Forecasting Tools

Workforce management tools come in all shapes and sizes. You may even have forecasting and WFM built into your call center software. With cloud contact centers, the market-leading tools are fully integrated and feed their forecasting directly from customer data leveraged in your contact center and CRM software.

When searching for workforce forecasting tools, look for platforms that provide:

• AI-powered forecasting and automated scheduling: Take the manual, time-consuming elements out of staff planning.
• Real-time dashboards with actionable metrics: Get a holistic view and benchmark performance compared to previous milestones.
• Scenario modeling and historical benchmarking: See how schedules may change given different planned and unplanned events.
• Seamless CRM, ticketing, and HRIS integrations: Share data from your other platforms for a data-backed forecast.
• Agent self-service tools (shift swaps, PTO requests): Remove the need for supervisor intervention for basic tasks.
• Dedicated call center workforce management interface: View all your changes, history, and forecast in a single place.

How Nextiva Helps You Forecast With Confidence

Nextiva’s WFM capabilities integrate data analysis, automation, and real-time intelligence into a single platform, empowering your teams to make data-driven, informed decisions based on accurate forecasts. Choose from a standalone WFM option or utilize the comprehensive suite of contact center functionality available with Nextiva’s omnichannel platform.

With Nextiva, you can:

• Predict staffing requirements based on workforce demand across all communication channels
• Automate schedule creation and monitor live adherence
• Optimize resource allocation and eliminate overstaffing
• Identify attrition risks and spot training opportunities
• Align labor decisions with real-time customer demand and business objectives

If you’re having trouble managing your staffing needs, take your first step toward ensuring your future workforce needs are accurate.

Use our WFM ROI calculator and learn how to streamline your business. 👇