Are there any tools to forecast calls ONLY, not workforce?

[Jose]

I'm in an interesting position. I work for a company that is managing a call center relationship on behalf of a client of ours. The center has workforce scheduling software in place (Aspect) but depends on us for call volume forecasting. We don't want to invest in a system to do end to end workforce scheduling since that would be overkill since all we need to do is forecast call volume. Are there any tools like this? I've played with some Erlang calculators but they all give me forecasted line needs, staffing needs, service levels etc. Basically I'd like to enter historical data our client provides and based on any noticeable trends create a forecast of anticipated call volumes. We'd like to be able to factor in marketing spends, seasonality, the impact things such as sporting events has on our clients' business, etc. I'm doing this in Excel right now and although it's fine for the small number of clients we have right now, we're planning on scaling dramatically in the near future and this solution will not scale. Any thoughts?

Thank you.

[jp2time]

Originally Posted by Jose

I'm in an interesting position. I work for a company that is managing a call center relationship on behalf of a client of ours. The center has workforce scheduling software in place (Aspect) but depends on us for call volume forecasting. We don't want to invest in a system to do end to end workforce scheduling since that would be overkill since all we need to do is forecast call volume. Are there any tools like this? I've played with some Erlang calculators but they all give me forecasted line needs, staffing needs, service levels etc. Basically I'd like to enter historical data our client provides and based on any noticeable trends create a forecast of anticipated call volumes. We'd like to be able to factor in marketing spends, seasonality, the impact things such as sporting events has on our clients' business, etc. I'm doing this in Excel right now and although it's fine for the small number of clients we have right now, we're planning on scaling dramatically in the near future and this solution will not scale. Any thoughts?

Thank you.

I just consulted with a company that purchased IEX Totalview just for Forecasting call volume. All of their business is outsourced so they did not need to purchase any scheduling pieces. That might be an option for you.