There are a lot of new features you will love! If you are a Forecaster, Scheduler or Intraday Analyst, there is something for you this month
Amongst the new items this month I’ve picked out the following items –
Import Forecast process
We can now import more than one skill here! If you currently do the import through the Windows client, then why not try doing the same process through the Web Forecast screen here so you can import the forecast for many skills at once, making things quicker and easier for you. And as I say every month anything you do in the web you can see who did it and when in the audit trail.
Dynamic Shrinkage
A great new feature to make the life of the Forecaster easier! In the Web Forecast screen you’ll see there’s a new column called Dynamic Shrinkage Template which is showing me which template is applied to which skill. To set up a new template there’s a new button on the top right Manage Dynamic Shrinkage. This takes you to a list of templates already set up. To create a new template click the New Template button.
When creating a template there are 2 main concepts to understand.
1 – We enter a percentage for ‘Share of the original shrinkage to use for today’. So let’s say for example I enter 25%, this means I only want a quarter of the original shrinkage to be used for on the day requirements calculations. So if my original shrinkage is 30%, then 25% of 30% (which is 7.5%) will be applied for on the day requirements.
2 – We then put the number of days in ‘Dynamic shrinkage period in days’. Let’s imagine I enter 6 here. I want the shrinkage to start reducing in 6 days’ time. For days in 7 days’ time and beyond the normal 30% shrinkage will apply. 6 days from today it will start to reduce, 5 days from today it will be lower again, until we see that today’s shrinkage is only 25% of the original shrinkage. The reduction is gradual and even throughout the 6 day period.
You will need permissions to Web > Forecast > Manage Dynamic Shrinkage to create and assign the templates. The templates can be applied in the Default scenario only.
So where do we see the forecast requirements with shrinkage?
In the Windows Open Forecast screen you’ve got the skill table at the bottom, and what’s really useful is the original shrinkage row for any dates amended through dynamic shrinkage are greyed out so it’s really easy to see that you’re now applying your dynamic shrinkage rather than the original shrinkage for those specific dates.
In the Window Schedules screen in the Results table the top row displays the revised forecast requirements and you can choose to apply shrinkage or not. The Web Staffing graph also displays requirements with the option of applying shrinkage. And also the Forecast vs Scheduled report considers shrinkage.
Finally to let you know that this is all updated overnight, so if I assign a dynamic shrinkage template to a certain skill, it’s in the following day that I’ll see the newly applied shrinkage. Once it’s set up it takes care of itself and it will apply those figures for you overnight, every night.
Shift Bidding developments
If this way of creating schedules is new to you then check out the blog or video for new items December 2021.
We have 3 new features this month
You can now choose to base your patterns on groups, so as well as being able to add patterns based on team, you can now use skill or an optional column.
The ranking criteria is stored for each team so if you’re using the same ranking week on week it remembers it from before, or you can change it if you wish.
And finally the agent’s choice position is displayed in the Result page. So you can whether that agent received their 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice etc. or it will show if they didn’t bid at all and the shift was allocated to them.
Do continue to give feedback on this relatively new feature and make sure that developers know how you want the system to be developed in the future.
e-learning Meetings
You may know we already have 2 types of meetings, normal meetings and one to one meetings, if the meetings feature is new to you, check out the blog/videos for June (part 2) and October last year.
We’ve got a new type of meeting called ‘e-learning’ meetings. So in a similar way to one to ones, we enter a time and date range for the system to choose the best times, and we enter which agents will attend the meetings. One of the differences with these meetings that they can overlap, the system can give more than one agent the meeting at a time, each agent is stopping working on what they’re doing and maybe at their desks reading some notes or completing an online form or quiz for example. Another example could be to use it to allocate a 30 minute slot each day for agent ‘admin’, this could be catching up on emails or reading the online messages board. For these types of meetings it doesn’t matter if they overlap or there’s more than one person off at the same time, they are all placed at the least negative effect for the skills they have. You can also add a link in the agenda field, so if you’re using it for the agent to do some e-learning, you can put a link to the training material in there.
The meetings will go on many agents in one process, and these can be recurring to save even more time! You can edit individual meetings if you need to afterwards.
Today’s Real Time Adherence Overview
In your Web Adherence screen you’ve got a new button in the Historical Overview page called Today. This will display the real time adherence for a team for each interval so far today. You can click on Show Agents to display the agent level detail. Then you can click on the ‘clock in a circle’ icon to look at an individual agent’s schedule for the day.
Any adherence amendments (Adjust to Neutral or Approve as in Adherence) made to the agent’s adherence affect past dates only. So the figures on the Today screen will stay as they are all day, but then tomorrow they will be updated to take account of any of these adjustments that you’ve made.
I hope there’s something in there that you’re looking forward to using. These are the main new items I’ve picked out this month, make sure you click on the red light bulb (on any web screen) and follow the links to the full release notes for details on all the updates.
Take care and I’ll see you next month!