Forcasting Call Volume and abandoment Rate

[LynnieBoo]

Could someone give me a simple example on forcasting call volume and abandoment rate .... I do have three years of data?

[SupersonicBuddha]

There are alot of ways for you to Forecast the call volume. The best way is to put your data down in excel and graph it against the days of the week, this should give you a fair idea on the volume of calls that comes in to your center daily.

On abandoment rate all you have to check is the calls that come into your center daily and the number that have been answered put a % to it so that you will pick up a daily relation to the two.

Present a business case to your company and present the value of this data and they can buy a Forecast Call Volume software, you can found in many kinds of ($, $$, $$$, $$$$) if don’t an excel will be your new fiancée, about the data for your call volume you need 3 or 4 months, and for your exceptions, this means holidays, vacations, etc. you can use the past years data.
http://www.erlang.com/ tries this, they have online free calculators and if fit to you can buy the tool.

[n_meghanath]

Originally Posted by LynnieBoo

Could someone give me a simple example on forcasting call volume and abandoment rate .... I do have three years of data?

Hi Lynnie,

Depending on the nature of the vertical that you are dealing with, the nature of the volume arrival trends may be Day of the week pattern or date of the month pattern. since you have data for the last 3 years it should be enough to understand the volume arrival trends.

It is a huge subject and hence may not be a good idea to look at a summarised example to get down to a real forecasting process.

However, the first step would be to to see the volume on an interval, daily, weekly and monthly basis (taking all reasons affecting normal volume delivery). you may want to leave all abnormal volume delivery days (volume affecting due to non recurring reasons) at the moment. Once a trend is established in terms of volume arrival, it would atleast lead you to the right direction for the next step.

A very simple example would be

volume
Jan-10000
Feb-11000
Mar-12000
Apr-13000

The trend talks about 1000 calls increased in every month.. so your May forecasted volume would be 14000 unless there is any changes that could lead to more calls or less calls (a marketting initiative would boost calls or lost of customers may result into less calls).

Abandoned % is entirely dependent on the Manpower you have to handle the volume.

This is just a thread for you to pull to discover the robust knowledge in this subject. you may write to me with details if you are looking for figures.