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Capacity planning in Connect Customer - Amazon Connect Customer
Getting started

Capacity planning in Connect Customer

A capacity plan helps you determine how many agents your contact center needs. It uses forecasts and scenario inputs to set staffing targets for a given time period.

When you create a capacity plan, you choose one of two plan types. With a Hiring plan, you get long-term FTE estimates for hiring and workforce planning. With a Scheduling plan, you get interval-level headcount needs for scheduling and resource use. For more information, see Capacity plan types.

For Hiring plans, capacity planning estimates your long-term FTE (full-time equivalent) needs up to 64 weeks in the future. You can share these estimates with Human Resources, Finance, and Training. These estimates help when your business launches a new product or enters a new Region and needs to hire staff.

Hiring plans use both long-term and short-term forecasts as inputs, along with scenario data that you provide. We recommend an overlap of at least 4 weeks between the two forecasts. The overlap helps identify contact patterns within a day. At a minimum, the two forecasts must overlap by at least 1 day.

Scheduling plans require only a published short-term forecast for the forecast group. No long-term forecast or overlap is needed. The plan gives you headcount needs in 15-minute or 30-minute intervals. The interval size matches your short-term forecast settings. Your plan dates must fall within the forecast date range. For more information, see Forecast requirements by plan type and Date range requirements.

Use Scheduling plan output to find staffing gaps across a short horizon. You can see how many agents you need in each interval and align staffing to demand patterns. The output also shows how each interval performs against your target metric. For details, see Review Scheduling plan output.

The following diagram shows the Hiring plan flow and the integration among published long-term forecasts, capacity planning, and capacity planning output.

Hiring plan flow from long-term forecasts through capacity planning inputs to capacity planning output.

Getting started

To create and share a capacity plan, complete the following steps. Some steps differ depending on whether you create a Hiring plan or a Scheduling plan.

  1. Create capacity planning scenarios

  2. (Optional) Import estimated future shrinkage and available full-time employees in Connect Customer: This step can improve the accuracy of your capacity plan. For Hiring plans, you upload day-level shrinkage and Available FTE data. For Scheduling plans, you import interval-level headcount and shrinkage data instead (see Import headcount and shrinkage data for Scheduling plans).

  3. Manage starting backlog projections: If you use an average time to complete target for the Task or Email channels, Connect Customer automatically generates starting backlog projections for capacity planning to use. You can review or override these projections.

  4. Create capacity plans using forecasts and scenarios

  5. Review capacity plan output

  6. Review, override, re-run, or download a capacity plan.

    Note

    Plan override is not available for Scheduling plans.

  7. Publish a capacity plan