Assembled handles the heavy lifting as far as calculating the staffing requirements to meet your customers' demands. Specifically, our algorithms help you determine how many people you need to staff per channel and per queue at any given time. Of course, every business is unique, and so our algorithms can be customized to meet your response time targets and account for your handle times.

A couple of things to note:

• From the Staffing Timeline, use the Configure staffing button as illustrated below, to customize response time targets and handle times. The button is only visible when a specific Channel is selected. The Configure staffing button takes into account the assumptions that you make about how your team will work throughout the day. 

• The default configured staffing parameters option is Manually configured productivity which uses a preset value. You may override this value or choose to leverage Dynamic productivity, which uses your historical data to predict the value for each interval in our SLA/staffing calculations. 

• Configurations are specific to each channel and queue pairing. For example, general issues that arrive via phone can be distinguished from specialist tickets that arrive via email.

• Users can also manually input values. Conduct what-if analyses to see how a change in targets would affect staffing requirements with the Test Scenario feature. This allows you to individually preview changes without permanently saving them.

• When your analysis is complete, click Save configuration to apply the changes and generate an updated set of forecasts and requirements, which will be visible across the entire account.

Important note about staffing parameters and required staffing numbers: When adjusting your variables for your Email channel, Assembled does not adjust the required staffing numbers but does adjust the forecasts. The reason for this is that staffing requirements still assume that you want to try and get to emails as soon as possible. However, using our email backlog visualization feature, you can easily see how changing these variables and your staffing impacts your email backlog.

Words used in the configure staffing panel 

• Service Level: The percentage of contacts who receive a response within the designated Target Response Time.

• Target Response Time: The target response time, in seconds, for determining the Service Level (this is set to hours for email).

• Average Handle Time (AHT): Average time required to handle a contact, in seconds.

• Concurrency: The number of simultaneous contacts an Agent handles, on average.

• Shrinkage: The percentage of time lost during productive periods. As a benchmark, we've seen this set to 20-30% at Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) or Tier 1 teams, and 30-50% for internal or Tier 2 teams, who may have more complex tasks. Use a higher shrinkage number if lunches and breaks are not included in the schedule.

• Email Productivity (Case throughput): The average number of email contacts handled per Agent, per hour.

• Minimum Staffing: The minimum number of people required to staff at any given time with forecasted volume.