Creating and viewing Workforce Management forecasts

You can use forecasting to determine the staffing surplus or deficits throughout a workday, allowing you to determine your staffing needs in advance to improve efficiency. Forecasting can help you determine the need for future staff based on past history, using KPIs (SLA, ASA, or Occupancy) combined with our proprietary algorithms to produce predictive staffing suggestions.

Requirements for creating and viewing Workforce Management forecasts

Table of Contents

How to create a Workforce Management forecast

Note: If you have not set up your schedule groups and queues, follow the instructions in the scheduling groups section before proceeding.

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Workforce Management.
  3. Click Forecasting.
  4. Click Create Forecast, then click Short Term or Long Term based on the length of forecast you wish to create.
    A pop-up will appear.
  5. Short Term forecasting: Enter the following information:
  6. Click Add scheduling groups. Follow the scheduling groups section below for adding scheduling groups to the format.

Importing historical data (optional)

Forecasts look at historical interaction information to determine staffing needs for future schedule generation. Follow this section if you want Workforce Management to look at imported data from a third-party contact center software to perform a forecast.

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Workforce Management.
  3. Click Forecasting
  4. Go to the Historical Data tab to import data from another system for forecasting
  5. Click the Import Historical Data button and select your csv file for import. Your CSV file needs the following information for each interval row
  6. Click Create Forecast.
  7. Follow the previous section to set up the forecast.
  8. Follow the rest of this article to add scheduling groups and generate a forecast.

How to add scheduling groups to a forecast

Now you will add the scheduling groups (that you created previously) to your forecast.

  1. Click Add scheduling group.
  2. Select the check boxes  of the scheduling groups that you want to create forecasts for. You can select multiple scheduling groups. You can also adjust the Engagement Capacity for messaging queues by clicking the pencil icon  . This determines the number of engagements an agent is expected to handle at a time.
  3. Click Add.
  4. Click Generate Forecast when you’ve added all the desired scheduling groups.
    The forecast you created will display a status of Processing. When the status is Ready, you can view the forecast.

How to create a forecasting profile

A forecasting profile allows you to use the same metrics across multiple forecasts, rather than setting up those same metrics each time a forecast is created. To create a forecasting profile, follow the steps below.

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Workforce Management.
  3. Click Forecasting.
  4. At the top of the page, click the Forecasting profiles tab.
  5. Click Create forecasting profile.
    A pop-up will appear.
  6. Fill out the information for your forecasting profile.
  7. Click Save.
    You will be taken to the configuration page for the profile.
  8. Click Add scheduling group to profile.
    A pop-up will appear.
  9. Configure your forecasting profile.
  10. Click Confirm.
    The forecasting profile is now created and available for use when creating forecasts.

How to view a forecast

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Workforce Management.
  3. Click Forecasting.
  4. Click the display name of the forecast you want to view.
    You will see the following information
  5. Use these options to change the data displayed:

How to generate staffing

  1. Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Workforce Management.
  3. Click Forecasting.
  4. Click the display name of a forecast that has a Completed status.
  5. Click the View forecast tab.
  6. Click View staffing.
    The graph will update with the following data for each scheduling group:

Note: You can use the same options when viewing a forecast to customize the data displayed in the staffing recommendation. Once you have generated staffing, the status of your forecast will change to as Complete.