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I actually had the same challenges here. When I spoke to my Account team at Aspect, they had a very good suggestion that has proven effective.
We are in a blended call center, so I have to account for inbound as well as outbound.
Here is what I did:
1. Ran a forecast for the inbound intra-day volume, and gather the forecast handle time data. Get an average call distribution, assuming that your call volume during the range of days you are forecasting for is approximately constant.
2. Calculate what percentage of the staff's time is spent on the inbound work in each interval. (Analogous to shrinkage)
3. Create another scenario for workload, and input a workload to represent the outbound work. (# of calls/day * AHT)
4. Input your inbound "shrinkage" as a new shrinkage set.
5. Run your "workload" forecast. (This will distribute your outbound work across all intervals, working around your inbound shrinkage)
6. Run a staffing forecast.
I have found that this works remarkably well considering the complexity of our call center.
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