Hi Rateesh:
The key distinction between planning for email and planning for phone work is the length of service level and the duration of the work. Usually phone work needs to be answered within a few minutes and the handle time is relatively brief (5 - 15 minutes).
Typically Email has a multi-hour or even a multi-day service level. The forecasting and scheduling methods designed by Erlang and used by most call centres really are not useful for forecasting and scheduling for email. The reason those methods fall apart is that they rely on the assumption that all work that starts in an interval must end in the same interval. So if you have 500 emails that have arrived for the opening of your contact center, a conventional Erlang approach sees this as 500 calls that must be answered in the first 30 minutes and vanish into thin air there after.
The reality is that the unfinished work can be carried over across many intervals. Erlang methods are by definition forced to ignore this reality.
Our planners forecast emails across intervals and days by using a more modern and more granular technology than Erlang. The forecasting process is built into the WFM system that we purchased. The system is clever enough to pack all the long service level work into the valleys that exist between the more volatile spikes of phone work. This is an important distinction because if you simply scale your call forecast by the additional email work that you need to do in the day then your overall forecast becomes unnecessarily volatile. When you blend email and phone work together, the blended forecast is supposed to become flatter. Indeed, this is the effect that our forecasting system yields.
I suspect you want to do your forecasting and scheduling manually. If the email is done by dedicated email agents then the calculations are easy. The place to start is with your service level. If the service level is three hours then take averages of your email counts every three hours. Multiply by the average Email composition time (minutes) and divide by the number of minutes available in a three hour period(180). This will yield the number of agents needed to process work that arrives perfectly evenly. Since a very long service level is essentially the same as a perfectly even arrival pattern, there is no need to use the Erlang calculations that Most WFM solutions would use (erroneously) to calculate Email staffing requirements.
Using the manual method that I have described above, you will be flat staffing for three hours at a time. However, at least you will not be overstaffing for volatile handling patterns and you will not be ignoring all work that can't be completed in the half hour that it arrives.
If you want to do better than the manual method I have described above, you may need to go shopping for a system that is designed to forecast long service level work. Just be aware that systems that treat emails as if they are phone calls are a fundamental mis-match for forecasting work that either sits in queue for a long time or takes a long time to process.
Cheers
Kevin
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