Staffing parameters

Use staffing parameters to tell Assembled how your team works, so it can turn your forecast into required staffing. They set your service level target, how long contacts take or how many a team member solves an hour, how many contacts each person handles at once, and how much productive time is lost. Each channel and queue has its own parameters, so general phone calls and specialist emails can have different targets.

To open them, go to Schedule > Staffing timeline, choose one channel and up to one queue, and select Configure staffing.

How staffing parameters work

• Parameters are set for each channel, and for each queue in a channel. The button shows which you’re editing, such as Configure staffing: Email.
• Configure staffing is available only when one channel and no more than one queue are selected.
• Saving recalculates required staffing for that channel or queue everywhere in Assembled, for everyone in your company.
• Parameters change required staffing, and the forecasted service level and backlog. They don’t change your volume forecast.
• Preview new requirements shows the effect of your changes on the Staffing timeline without saving them, so you can test a scenario first.

Change staffing parameters

Important: Saving changes required staffing for everyone in your company who uses this channel or queue, including in schedule generation. Use Preview new requirements to check the effect first.

1. Go to Schedule > Staffing timeline.
2. In Channels, choose one channel. To set parameters for a queue, add a Queue filter with one queue.
3. Select Configure staffing.
4. In Configure staffing parameters, change the values you need. See Staffing parameter options.
5. To check the effect first, select Preview new requirements. The dialog closes, and required staffing on the Staffing timeline updates for the current view without being saved.
6. To keep your changes, select Configure staffing again, then Save parameters.

Required staffing is recalculated with the new values. A preview that you don’t save is discarded when you reload the page. The dialog shows when the parameters were last edited, and by whom.

Staffing parameter options

The dialog groups the parameters into sections. Which parameters appear depends on the channel.

Keep in mind: For email and back office, Minimum staffing isn’t applied unless our team has set it up for your company. To use a minimum for these channels, contact our team.

Unproductive shrinkage

Unproductive shrinkage isn’t all the time team members spend away from contacts. Schedule time off, breaks, and meetings as events instead. Shrinkage is the gap between the productive time you schedule and the productive time your team actually delivers.

A common way to set it is to subtract your adherence from 100%. For example, if your team usually reaches 85% adherence, set shrinkage to 15%. Without adherence data, start from a benchmark, such as 5 to 10% for traditional voice teams, 10 to 15% for omnichannel teams, or 15% or more for complex, digital-first teams, and refine it as you collect data.

Dynamic or flat productivity and handle time

For Email productivity and Average handle time (AHT), choose where the value comes from:

For dynamic email productivity, you can also turn on Stabilize productivity outliers, which uses a 28-day average to correct extreme productivity values. For how these forecasts are made, see Forecast models.

How required staffing is calculated

Required staffing is the number of people you need working in an interval to meet your targets. Interval length is your company’s base interval, which you can see in Configure > Company settings.

Chat, phone, SMS, and social

Live channels use Erlang C, a standard model for staffing queues where customers wait for an answer:

1. Workload = forecasted contacts × average handle time ÷ interval length.
2. Erlang C finds the smallest number of people for which at least your Service level percentage of contacts is answered within the Target response time.
3. If you’ve set Maximum occupancy, the number of people is raised to at least workload ÷ maximum occupancy.
4. Required staffing = number of people ÷ ((1 − unproductive shrinkage) × concurrency). For phone, concurrency is 1.
5. If the interval has forecasted contacts and the result is below Minimum staffing, minimum staffing is used.

For example: you forecast 60 chats in a 30-minute interval, AHT is 10 minutes, and your target is 80% answered within 2 minutes. Workload = 60 × 10 ÷ 30 = 20, and Erlang C finds that 24 people meet the target. With concurrency of 2 and shrinkage of 20%, required staffing = 24 ÷ (0.8 × 2) = 15 people for that interval.

Email and back office

By default, email and back office are staffed to complete the work that arrives in each interval within that interval:

Required staffing = volume ÷ (productivity per interval × (1 − unproductive shrinkage)).

• Volume is the forecasted new cases, plus, for email, the forecasted reopened cases × the Reopens multiplier.
• Productivity per interval is Email productivity scaled to the interval length. For a 30-minute interval, it’s half the hourly productivity.

For example: you forecast 30 emails in a 30-minute interval, a team member solves 12 emails an hour, and shrinkage is 25%. Productivity per interval is 6, so required staffing = 30 ÷ (6 × 0.75) = 6.7 people for that interval.

With this method, Service level and Target response time don’t change required staffing for email and back office, but they do change the forecasted service level and backlog on the Staffing timeline. To spread the work across your SLA window instead, see Staffing requirements for email and back office.

If your company uses the case lifecycle model, you can also choose whether volume counts cases or units of work. See Case lifecycle on the Staffing timeline.