How many agents do you need at any given time tomorrow? What about next week? Or next month? What if you look at next year?
Ask any customer support leader about their top challenges in running a call center, and you’ll likely hear these two words at some point: capacity planning.
Your customer demand and call volume can be fickle and unpredictable. Your average handle time can vary widely between complex and basic customer interactions. Your omnichannel approach makes it tough to determine how much time a ticket will actually take.
And, if and when you’re caught off guard by a surge in demand, it’s tricky to make adjustments in real time. All the while, your customer experience and satisfaction (not to mention your agents themselves) hang in the balance.
Effective capacity planning and resource allocation can feel like a puzzle — but it’s certainly not impossible to solve. Especially with modern AI-powered workforce management (WFM) platforms, it’s easier than ever for contact center leaders to make informed decisions about staffing levels and resource planning.
This guide covers what you need to know to transform contact center capacity planning from a complete guessing game to a strategic planning process.
Capacity planning (sometimes called “workforce planning”) is the process of determining how much your support team needs to get done in a set time period and then aligning your resources to execute that successfully.
Put simply, it’s about making sure you have enough resources (read: the right number of agents) in place to meet your customer demand. You’re predicting (or forecasting) your staffing needs and making a plan to fulfill them.
With that basic definition in mind, it’s not hard to see why this is so crucial for your contact center operations. But, if you need a little more convincing, here are a few of the main benefits of effective capacity planning.
Successful workforce planning ensures that your support team is staffed appropriately to handle incoming customer requests and inquiries — without long wait times for your customers or unnecessary idle time for your agents.
When you’re able to successfully align your resources with your demand, you streamline your workflows, reduce wasted effort, and keep things running smoothly.
Your service level agreements (SLAs) set clear expectations for your response and resolution times. Missing them can lead to frustrated customers and damaged trust.
Capacity planning helps you forecast call volume and adjust staffing accordingly, which improves your response time and keeps you on track to meet (or even exceed) your SLA metrics. For example, Brooks reduced phone wait times by an impressive 66% with Assembled’s WFM platform.
90% of customers rate an “immediate” response (meaning 10 minutes or less) as essential or very important when they have a customer service question. So, long wait times, slow responses, and clunky workflows are sure to frustrate them.
When you have the right number of support agents available at the right times, you can provide more efficient support — which leads to happier customers, better trust, and stronger retention.
Agents are on the frontlines of relentless tickets and frustrated customers. That makes burnout a persistent problem in call centers, with 63% of agents saying they experience a high job burnout rate.
This can translate to reduced morale, low motivation, high turnover, and increased attrition on your support team. But, a well-planned workforce strategy prevents or mitigates overwhelming workloads, so agents have the support they need to stay engaged and effective.
Capacity planning is part art and part science — and getting it wrong can have a big impact on your bottom line. Overstaffing means unnecessary labor costs while understaffing means a poor customer experience and potentially lost revenue. Inadequate planning might also trigger you to hire more agents at a large expense when you really just need to be smarter about your existing team.
Effective capacity planning helps you strike the right balance and make the most of your budget (and your existing resources) without sacrificing your service quality. For example, Thrasio was able to avoid hiring an additional 190 frontline agents after implementing Assembled’s WFM platform and experienced annual cost savings of $500,000.
Your customer demand isn’t static. It can fluctuate due to seasonality, new product launches, or unexpected events.
And, while you can’t always foresee these wrenches, solid capacity planning allows you to understand your resources in real time, respond to changes quickly, and adjust your staffing levels to maintain top-notch service.
Capacity planning is important — but that doesn’t mean it’s intuitive. It’s easy to feel like you need a crystal ball to determine your staffing needs and plan accordingly.
You aren’t alone in that feeling. Here are four common capacity planning challenges and how you can navigate around them.
Call centers rarely have a steady demand. Spikes in ticket volume can seemingly come out of nowhere — from a product issue, a seasonal rush, or even a viral social media moment. Without proper planning, you’re left scrambling to make reactive staffing adjustments, leading to overwhelmed agents and frustrated customers.
Solution: Rely on historical data and forecasting tools to spot patterns in ticket volume so that you can anticipate demand rather than constantly reacting to it. While full-time employees (or FTEs) certainly have their time and place, a more flexible staffing model — such as part-time agents, an outsourced overflow team, or even chatbots — can help you scale up or down quickly when unexpected surges happen.
When demand is so fickle, it’s tough to match agent schedules to your needs. Too few agents during peak hours leads to long wait times, while too many during slow periods results in wasted resources.
Solution: Use WFM software that assists with schedule optimization based on historical trends, business priorities, and agent availability. Offering staggered shifts, split shifts, or flexible scheduling options can also help ensure adequate coverage while giving agents more control over their work hours.
Related to the above, overstaffing and understaffing are other major challenges with capacity planning. It seems like you’re either shorthanded and struggling to keep up or over-resourced and trying to find ways to keep agents occupied. Hitting that sweet spot where agents are busy — but not too busy — feels like a moving target.
Solution: Regularly review your call center and performance metrics — like average handle time (AHT), occupancy rate, and service levels — to fine-tune your staffing approach. Your capacity plan should include both long-term forecasting and short-term adjustments to maintain the right staffing levels.
Staffing miscalculations translate to constantly overworked and overwhelmed agents. Burnout sets in quickly, leading to high turnover and even more staffing challenges for you to deal with. When agents are frustrated and exhausted, it can negatively impact their interactions — and your customer success and satisfaction too.
Solution: Proactively manage agent workloads by ensuring realistic shift expectations, providing ample breaks, and empowering them with the tools and support they need to succeed.
Artificial intelligence in contact centers has quickly evolved from basic automation and simple chatbots to empowering support teams with more accurate forecasting, intelligent scheduling, and real-time alerts.
As support leaders deal with more pressure to optimize staffing, reduce costs, and meet ambitious service key performance indicators (KPIs), AI-powered workforce management is essential.
Here’s a look at how a platform like Assembled can improve efficiency, ensure SLA compliance, and create a better experience for your customers and your agents — along with real-world case studies that illustrate the benefits.
Assembled’s scheduling tools help you create dynamic staffing plans that adjust in real time and ensure agents are available when (and where) they’re needed most.
With intelligent automation and real-time adherence monitoring, you can optimize break schedules, balance workloads across multiple channels, and ensure seamless coverage without overstaffing. Brooks used Assembled’s real-time scheduling adjustments to manage workloads more efficiently and make nimble, intraday scheduling changes.
Assembled leverages historical performance data to create accurate forecasts that help you prepare for peak seasons, product surges, and unexpected demand spikes.
By integrating AI-powered forecasting models, you can proactively adjust your staffing levels instead of reacting to volume spikes. Poshmark, for example, improved response times by 10% year over year after implementing Assembled’s forecasting capabilities.
Capacity planning has always been a challenge. But, throw remote or hybrid work arrangements in the mix, and it feels impossible. Assembled simplifies remote workforce management by offering real-time tracking, adherence monitoring, and unified scheduling across multiple locations.
For Thrasio, which manages support for nearly 190 brands, Assembled offered the ability to oversee vendor and in-house operations in one place. This visibility helped the company automate 53% of customer interactions while maintaining a 97% CSAT score.
Assembled’s AI-driven alerts proactively notify teams when SLA thresholds are at risk, allowing you to make real-time adjustments to schedules, redistribute workloads, or escalate urgent cases.
By leveraging predictive insights, you can prevent backlog buildups and maintain consistent response times. Thrasio relied on predictive insights to maintain top 1% operational performance, reduce response times to under a minute, and ensure high SLA compliance.
Capacity planning can feel a lot like throwing a dart at a board. But the risks of getting it wrong are high — including longer wait times, overwhelmed agents, high turnover, and a poor customer experience.
The good news is that capacity planning doesn’t need to be such a shot in the dark. A workforce management solution like Assembled can help you identify trends, forecast your needs, and build intelligent schedules that empower (rather than exhaust) your agents and customers
Ready to transform your call center operations with effective capacity planning? Check out a demo of Assembled today.
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