Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling

With workforce management capabilities native to Amazon Connect, you can reduce the time and cost needed to build your own solution or integrate with traditional third-party solutions. Contact center supervisors can forecast, plan, and schedule directly in Amazon Connect. Agents can view their shifts, handle contacts, and take time off within the same application.

Schedule agents more efficiently by using AI to accurately predict customer service workloads, including contact volume and average handling time. Intraday forecasts allow supervisors to be more responsive by providing rest-of-day contact volume predictions that are updated every 15 minutes.

Accurately estimate the optimal number of full- time equivalent (FTE) agents needed to meet your service-level goals with Amazon Connect’s capacity planning. Through what-if analyses, you can continuously refine these targets over time while collaborating with HR, finance, and training teams to facilitate long-term strategic resource planning and reduce operational overhead.

Ensure you have the right number of agents, with the right skills, staffed at the right time to support a variety of customer contacts. Amazon Connect scheduling generates individual agents’ schedules based on their assigned skills, your short-term forecasts, shift patterns, and internal rules and policies. Supervisors can then view and adjust these schedules, before sharing them with the agents through the agent workspace.

Eliminate the need for manual manager approvals by giving your agents the flexibility to choose when they want to work overtime or take time off within predetermined parameters. Using AI, Amazon Connect simplifies real-time schedule readjustments, such as moving or creating additional rest breaks, freeing supervisors to focus on higher impact activities.

Amazon Connect is now giving us a way to consolidate our processes for determining our contact center workload, staffing levels, and agent scheduling. This is incredibly powerful; it dramatically simplifies the current disjointed experiences into a unified platform for our managers and agents. We have complete visibility to manage our workforce and optimize our contact center across both internal and outsourced partners, all within Amazon Connect. The machine learning–powered forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling capabilities in Amazon Connect helped us improve our forecasts and staffing accuracies by over 5%. Our agents will now have a more consistent workload and more time for training, all while delighting our end customers.