Design And Implementation Of The Task Prediction And Workforce Allocation System For Call Center

The project deals with inbound calls of a customer care center and proposes atool to forecast calls and staff the operators of the contact center. The project, called Plan To Operation‘, was made for Phonetica, which was corporate by a team of theService Engineering Lab of the University of Pavia. The system will provide themanager of the call center the accurate forecasting value and reasonable workforcemanagement strategy in order to improve the efficiency and reduce cost.The tool forecasts the number of inbound calls in the following days (split byhour) and the related number of required operators to satisfy a given service level,thus moving in the conceptual environment of Erlang C. This is a key point, because,differently form most call centers, the Phonetica operators serve multiple customers,and there is, therefore, a many to many relation between customers and operators.The core engine of the forecasting is based on ARIMA (Autoregressive IntegratedMoving Average), and it processes a wide variety of variables as historical data,error rate in historical forecasting, percentage of calls answered within target,percentage of abandoned calls (total), operators occupancy, etc. The system wasimplemented by adopting the Pentaho BI suite, which will provide the suite of ETL(exact, transform, load), during the processing original historical records. Finally,by using CDE, the web application would be generated.The testing was divided into2parts: functional testing and data testing.The proposal is producing accurate forecasting and efficient workforce staffing.Finally, it looks flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of environments.