No matter the role of your call center in your business, you want the people manning the phones to be as prepared as possible for anything and everything they might face on the job. Effective training plays a huge part in this to ensure that your agents know how to respond to different questions and different scenarios. But even if you and your team are completely prepared for any and all callers on the other end of the line there is something else you need to be prepared for: Call volume.

Forecasting potential call volume is a critical piece of ensuring that your agents are performing to the best of their ability. What’s more, it will also help you staff your call center appropriately, which could potentially save you money if you were staffing more agents than you needed on certain days or at certain times. On the other hand, if you aren’t staffing enough agents it can lead to frustration and burnout, neither of which is healthy for the individual agents or the team—and the prevention of which can help make your team happier and more productive. Then there is the most obvious benefit: If your call center is staffed according to projected call volume it will minimize wait times and abandoned calls, improving customer satisfaction and potentially increasing sales (depending on the role of the call center for your business).

The best way to forecast future call volume is to look at all the data you’ve collected on past call volume (which if you’re using CallShaper, will be quite a lot). The two most important points: Call volume based on time of day, day of the week and season and the average length of every call, plus if the call length changes depending on the time, day or season. You can use this data to calculate expected call volume and then work backwards from there to determine how many agents you will need to handle that volume efficiently.

Forecasting future call volume is just one of the helpful practices that CallShaper makes easy. To learn more about how the dialer can improve your bottom line, contact us today.