How many staff do you need to handle the planned load in your contact center?  When I was thinking about how contact center companies and team make these calculations, I found this article on www.callcentrehelper.com.  This article describes the following steps in calculating your staff requirements:

• How many calls do you handle generally
• How many calls do you handle every 30 minutes
• What is the average call handling time
• What is the service level you provide
• What is the maximum occupancy of your agents
• Include agent unavailability in your numbers (shrinkage)
• Map staff requirements vs shift patterns

Let your contact center grow or shrink as you need – elastify!

Planning is one thing. Reality is often different!

As you plan resource capacity for the next month, you use the data from previous months to – hopefully – correctly estimate the number of calls/communications that will reach your contact center. However, it could very well happen that you get more (or far less) incoming calls. Or calls may be distributed differently over a day than what was estimated.

At that moment, you have to adapt the plan and potentially shift resources.

The same is true for your infrastructure. When you implement new contact center infrastructure, you look at previous statistics and estimated future needs, to make correct decisions.

Also read

• 5 topics that you approach differently when implementing Amazon Connect vs on-premise IVR solutions
• Optimizing routing based on MyTrailhead trainings

Elastify your contact center infrastructure

When implementing an on-premise contact center solution, you carefully calculate what infrastructure you will need to cope with peek load. This mostly means that you have to oversize your solution for a big amount of time, as you will not reach that peek load need very often.

With a Cloud Contact Center solution like Amazon Connect, this is different.  Amazon Connect grows as you need more resources, and it shrinks when you need less agents available.  That’s what we mean by ‘Elastify‘! With Amazon Connect, you don’t have to worry about getting the correct infrastructure sizing, or you don’t have to take care of the correct number of licenses available.  This is all managed for you by Amazon Web Services.