Forecasting Email

[mobile]

Hi ,

I welcome comments /suggestion/materials about effective way of forecasting emails. whats the most useful one? is there a standard to use?

I will greatly appreciate any information you can pass on.

Good Day!

[JerichoIlagan]

I suggest you check your email stats for the previous year (if you are servicing that email account) and try to get a history from there. A day-to-day forecast based on previous days may also help.

[mobile]

Hi Jericho

Thanks for the input.

[JoelDup]

use historical data - monthly and day to day volumes
communicate with marketing - be informed about mailouts, email-outs, campaigns etc. look for trends and other details compared to marketing initiatives

determine if the email are from new emailing customers or regular emailing customers - perhaps that can help you predict from who, when and how many you may recieve

[mobile]

Hi JoelDup,

Thanks for info... i was concern if there 's a template we can use for forecasting.. nothing as fancy as workforce managment.

Regards,
Mobile

[Earl]

Hi mobile,

You are not alone with this. I have worked for many companies and they are all experiencing the same Problem in the -Email areas and also for tickets. What I have seen is that most companies treat this as if is is a one and done with no service level commitments.

The same approach and philosophy used for inbound phone calls can be applied to the e-mails. In most of the situations with a 24 by 7 center. I noticed that the companies always create the schedules in shifts with most of the agents working in the morning and if you are ever short staff or come in the next day, the agents are always behind the curve and there is a need to throw everyone in the center into answering these e-mails which impact other areas. Or you request overtime which you can't always fill and/or it comes at a cost to the business.

Unfortunately the emails come into the center like phone calls so the following you will have to perform:

1. Determine e-mail arrival patterns by time of day and day of week
2. Determine workloads (how many e-mails come in by half hour or hourly and multiply it by the average time it takes to resolve
(since there is no true tracking system to give exacts, guess using a reasonable average handle time)

3. Determine the service levels you want to achieve, such as what is the response times you are mandating for the e-mails to be answered. (find a way that your staff can't cherry pick) This always increase impact service levels to e-mails.

4. Determine the shrinkage factors for your call center. These shrinkage factors are unproductive time. Time away from the e-mails. such as breaks, training, vacation, coaching, and etc. This is critical because you will have to add this number on top of your staffing numbers acheived from your work load. This will give you the added staff to have when people are on vacation or away from the e-mails.

5. Move away from shfit scheduling and attempt to go to a bette scheduling which will give you adequate staffing based on peaks and valleys in the arrival patterns of your e-mails.

6. Put measurement to ensure you staff is working the e-mails and time spent in the e-mail queue along with how many e-mails handled and types of e-mails.

I hope this helps.

[mobile]

Hi Earl,

Thanks for all your valid inputs. I've tried doing the forecasting method that you've all suggested and it works... with a little modification though.

Thanks again, Mobile