An important part of delivering effective and efficient service is anticipating customer demand, or put another way, forecasting the workload. The beautiful thing about forecasting customer workload is that it encourages you – actually requires you – to know your business. It’s transformative to your ability to deliver effective service.

Resource management is the other side of this equation. You forecast customer demand and then need the resources to match it. You can see how these two aspects of service delivery are interrelated.

In most customer service environments, work arrives randomly from moment to moment, when customers choose. That’s true in a retail store, a contact center, an emergency department and so many other settings. It doesn’t matter if you have the most incredible team. They must be there when customers need them. A common metric to measure resource management is schedule adherence.

Watch this video from my LinkedIn Learning course “Service Metrics for Customer Service” to better understand forecast accuracy and schedule adherence.

Workload forecast and resource management from Service Metrics for Customer Service by Brad Cleveland