Skills-based call routing substantially complicates the management tasks of creating forecasts and schedules. The strategies currently being used for these tasks will be described and their strengths and weaknesses analyzed. Recommendations will then be made for accommodating the complexities of skills-based call routing. Skills-based call routing delivers greater economies of scale, thereby reducing the number of agents needed. Using skills-based call routing, the percentage of time an agent will handle each call type depends on call routing rules, such as conditional queuing, changing call priority, queuing to backup skills, time of day and day of week.
Availability also depends on other agents' skills and schedules.
Since agents scheduled for one particular call type may also be utilized for other call types, the number of agents needed for each call type depends on which agents are scheduled for each call type. This revelation is very significant since it identifies a circular problem. Erlang C can be used as a single step of the process of calculating agent requirements for skills-based call routing. One option is to calculate agent requirements for each call type independently, then apply an efficiency factor to lower the requirements since multi-skilled agents provide greater efficiency. Another approach is to add the call volume of all call types and calculate the weighted AHT for each interval.