Enhanced Strategic Planner

This product requires a Workforce Management Premium license. User should have access to ESP.

The Enhanced Strategic Planner (ESP) application:

  • provides a what-if tool for long-term planning to give options and explain impacts for staffing and budgeting

  • provides you with data to make informed long-term staffing decisions

  • returns expected results, based on changes because of overstaffing or understaffing

ESP supported languages:

  • English

  • Brazilian Portuguese

  • French

  • Spanish

ESP online help supported languages:

  • English

  • Spanish

If ESP does not support the language setting, ESP is in English.

ESP Plans

You create plans in ESP that are a snapshot of long-term forecasts. You select from a list of forecasts generated in CXone Mpower WFM or imported using ESP. In a plan, you can adjust staffing requirements to see how the changes affect service level, ASA, or occupancy.

You can view or change staffing data for individual Scheduling Units. This allows you to plan staffing by site, location, or internal/outsource type. Use a unique Scheduling Unit for each contact center location or type.

You can view or change plan data for:

  • Scheduling Units

  • individual WEM Skills, including real-time and deferrable WEM Skills

  • long-term forecasts

The WEM Skill rollup values show the changes you make to an individual WEM Skills in the plan. You can change forecasted volume received and AHT data at the WEM Skill rolluplevel and the system distributes these values to the WEM Skills included in the plan. As you make changes to a plan, you see immediately how these changes affect the staffing requirements.

Plans with deferrable WEM Skills

For deferrable WEM Skills, the plan details page includes these parameters:

  • Volume Handled

  • Actual FTE Capacity

  • Backlog

These parameters are in addition to the ones seen for real-time WEM Skills. The plan uses volume handled and maximum occupancy values to calculate FTE values for deferrable WEM Skills.

Forecast Objectives

A plan displays the forecast objectives used to create the long-term forecast for the plan . The forecast objectives include service level, maximum occupancy, and ASA. WFM calculates the requirements for each forecast objective used in the long-term forecast. The FTE requirements use the maximum value of the individual forecast objective requirements:

  • service level - requirements that meet the service level goal

  • maximum occupancy - requirements that meet the maximum occupancy goal

  • ASA - real-time WEM Skill requirements that meet the ASA goal

Digital Channel Management (DCM)

The flow of work in digital channels may:

  • experience large time lapses between the exchange of messages within an interaction

  • experience interruptions for new interactions from within a channel and across channels

  • change modes of communication over the course of the interaction

Common examples of such channels are Voice, SMS, Chat, Email, and Social Media platforms.

The nature of an interaction is vital to calculating proper staffing levels and scheduling employees (agents). As digital channels become more common, the volume of these digital channels increases. ESP allows you to change the simultaneous handling for WEM Skills and see how the changes affect staffing levels for WEM Skills.

Historical Data

Foundational to Long-term Planning/Strategic Planning is an accurate forecast. Part of ensuring an accurate forecast is adjusting the previous forecast based on known upcoming factors or recent history.

The Historical Data page allows users to view, add, or edit historical (actual) volume received and AHT data by day for WEM Skills. These actual values display in ESP plans. The plans also show the percent variance for volume received and AHT. Users can compare actual and forecasted volume received and AHT, and the variance of these parameters by day, week, or month. This information allows users to adjust the forecasts in a plan based on history.