Rockwell Automation Arena Contact Center Edition Users Guide - Manual (Page 10)

A RENA C ONTACT C ENTER E DITION U SER ’ S G UIDE
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“Marketing has come up with a new program giving our ‘preferred customers’ a
special priority when they contact us with questions. What I’m worried about is how
this new program will affect the waiting times that the rest of our customers
experience.”
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“We’ve been asked to provide telephone service and support for another business unit.
They’re asking us how much staff we need to hire or cross-train in order to handle this
increased load.”
Contact center managers have traditionally attacked these types of problems with several
methods, including “gut feel” estimates, back-of-the-envelope calculations, elaborate
spreadsheets, and analytical queueing formulas such as Erlang C. Each of these
approaches, however, has significant limitations when applied to contact centers and con-
tact center networks.
Simulation is the only analysis method that can effectively and accurately model a contact
center (or a network of contact centers). Such models can be used to study the perfor-
mance of the system. The simulation method is based on creating a computerized “copy”
of the actual contact center system and running this system on the computer for a period
of time representing a day, a week, or a month.
In particular, simulation explicitly models the interaction between contacts (e.g., calls or
email), routes, and agents, as well as the randomness of individual contact arrivals and
handle times.
By using simulation, managers and analysts translate contact center data (forecasts,
contact-routing vectors, contact-handle time distributions, agent schedules, agent skills,
etc.) into actionable information about service levels, customer abandonment, agent
utilization, first-contact resolution, and other important contact center performance
measures. These results are used to support key management decisions that drive contact
center operations and expenditures.