Elevate your contact center workforce management using the new Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling features (2025 Q2)

Workforce management (WFM) is essential for contact center success. It matches staff levels to call volume patterns, which reduces customer wait times and operational costs. Effective WFM ensures the right agents with the right skills are available at the right time to handle customer contact volume. This systematic approach to scheduling maximizes both agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling, a feature of Amazon Connect, helps customers to predict, allocate, and verify that the right number of agents are scheduled at the right time to meet their operational goals with minimal overstaffing. The AI-powered capabilities make it easy for contact center supervisors to anticipate contact volumes and average handle time with high accuracy, determine ideal staffing levels, optimize agent schedules, and help supervisors to track schedule adherence. Turning it on takes just a click, eliminating the need to build custom applications or integrate expensive third-party solutions into your contact center. These capabilities help optimize internal operations, meet service goals, and improve agent and customer satisfaction.

With these benefits in mind, let’s explore new game-changing capabilities from Amazon Connect that are transforming how contact centers optimize the workforce.

1. Customize work activities

Work activity customization is a crucial feature for organizations looking to enhance their workforce management capabilities in Amazon Connect. While the traditional approach only offered a default “Work” activity, modern contact centers require more granular control over how they categorize and schedule different types of agent work. This customization allows organizations to better align their workforce management with actual business operations and improve operational efficiency.

Amazon Connect now supports custom work labels for agent schedules, making it easier for you to identify the type of work an agent is scheduled for. With this launch, you can create work activities with custom labels and assign them to agent schedules by day of the week. This feature addresses multiple scheduling scenarios across both customer-facing and non-customer-facing activities. For example, when agents are working on administrative tasks or working in a third-party application, customers label these as productive activities but the time spent on these activities is not contributing towards forecasted demand in Connect.

For example, you can assign “Order processing” as the work activity for Monday, “Returns management” for Tuesday, and “Work” (existing default activity) for rest of the week. Thus simplifying the experience for managers as they can now easily identify who is scheduled for which type of work. This launch also improves the experience for agents as they now have visibility into how their time is allocated.

Diagram 1: You can create a customized work label in Shift activities. Work activity option is available only for productive activities.

Diagram 2: You can specify the default activity for each day in Shift profiles. Only activities set up as work activities can be selected as default activities.

This customization capability proves particularly valuable for organizations managing diverse workforce segments, including temporary staff and contractors. The feature enables businesses to create distinct work activities with custom labels while maintaining clean data separation – crucial for accurate workforce analytics. By accurately tracking time spent on different activities, organizations can improve their workforce planning and resource allocation while maintaining precise scheduling aligned with forecasted demand. It ensures proper coverage across both customer-facing and administrative tasks, while creating clear visibility between productive and non-productive time. This comprehensive approach to managing varied work streams and schedules demonstrates how custom work activities can address complex workforce management scenarios while enhancing operational efficiency, making it an essential tool for modern contact centers dealing with diverse staffing arrangements and complex scheduling needs.

2. Edit forecasts via UI

Contact centers often need to adjust the system generated forecast to match anticipated fluctuations in customer interactions and service times. These changes often occur during product launches, marketing initiatives, or seasonal events that affect service demands. Having precise forecasts is essential, as it directly influences both operational performance and customer satisfaction.

Before this feature, forecasters had to manually download CSV template, perform calculations, enter data, and re-upload the completed template. This becomes especially burdensome for contact centers managing multiple forecast groups with different business needs.

The new edit forecasts via UI feature enhances contact center operations in several key ways. It increases efficiency by reducing manual calculation time and errors, while allowing businesses to adapt quickly to changing needs. Organizations can better match staff levels to expected customer volumes, ensuring proper coverage during peak periods for improved customer service.

Amazon Connect now gives you three simple ways to adjust your forecast using the UI: by percentage, by adding/subtracting numbers, or by replacing system generated forecast by a specific number. Think of it like having a smart remote control where you can fine-tune your forecasts for your entire business, specific queues, or by channel (like phone or chat). For example, if you’re running a holiday promotion, you could quickly increase the expected chat volume by 20% just for your sales forecast group, while leaving other predictions unchanged.

Diagram 3: An example UI override screen

3. Recurring activities

WFM schedulers can now create recurring activities for agent schedules, similar to how you set up recurring meetings in your Outlook or Google calendar. Let me explain with a simple example:

Imagine Sarah, a workforce scheduler at a customer service center with 100 agents. Every Monday at 9 AM, she needs to schedule a 30-minute team meeting for each team leader with their agents. She also needs to schedule weekly one-on-one coaching sessions every Wednesday at 2 PM for each agent with their supervisor.

Before this feature, Sarah had to manually enter this meetings every single week. For 100 agents, this meant manually creating about 200 calendar entries each week, a task that takes her about 2 hours. There was also a higher risk of making mistakes or forgetting to schedule some meetings.

With this new recurring activities feature, Sarah can set these meetings up just once and mark them as “recurring weekly”. Amazon Connect automatically add the meetings to future weeks, a task that now takes 15 minutes to set up. The meetings will now automatically appear in all future schedules until she decides to change them.

This is similar to how you might set up a recurring monthly team lunch or weekly status meeting in your own calendar – set it once, and it appears automatically for all future dates. This simple automation saves Sarah nearly 8 hours of work each month, allowing her to focus on more important tasks.

Diagram 4: An example recurring shared activity that repeats every Monday 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM

Here are the key capabilities within this feature:

1. When adding recurring activities:
   1. Changes made to the published schedule take effect immediately
   2. Changes made to the draft schedule require republishing to take effect
2. Recurring activities can be set to either end on a specific date or continue indefinitely.
3. Activities set to recur indefinitely will appear automatically in all future schedules.
4. You can modify either a single instance or the entire series of a recurring activity. Changes only affect future instances, not past ones
5. The Actions log displays recurring activity schedules and exceptions. You can track progress in this log, where status changes from “In Progress” to “Complete.”
6. When creating a recurring activity check “Override rules” to bypass restrictions like working hour limits. If unchecked, agents who break rules will not be assigned the activity. You can see which agents were excluded and why in the Actions log.

Call to action

Learn more about Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling and Amazon Connect analytics data lake capabilities.

Amazon Connect Administrator Guide helps you get started using Amazon Connect. Learn how to provision, configure, monitor, and scale a virtual contact center.

Learn Amazon Connect core concepts and earn a badge as communications specialist and developer with Amazon Connect Learning Plans and Badges.

Get hands-on with Amazon Connect Workshops that are designed to teach or introduce practical skills, techniques, or concepts which you can use to solve business problems.

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Release notes

1. Amazon Connect now supports custom work labels for agent schedules

2. Amazon Connect launches forecast editing UI

3. Amazon Connect now supports recurring activities in agent schedules

About the Authors

	Vikas Prasad works as a Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Maryland, USA. He enables customers to achieve business outcomes through Customer Experience solutions and digital transformation. In his leisure time, he enjoys outdoor activities such as traveling, cycling, and trekking.
	Lakshay Mutreja is a Solutions Architect at AWS based in California, specializing in Amazon Connect and contact center solutions. With a passion for innovation, he partners with customers to transform their contact center operations and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Lakshay helps organizations leverage Amazon Connect’s capabilities to achieve their business objectives while continuously exploring cutting-edge approaches to enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency.