Contact Center Management
Contact Center Capacity Planning
Ensure Scheduling Efficiencies While Meeting Your Associates’ Needs
Our Approach
The Northridge Group’s approach utilizes capacity planning models to optimize staffing.
Our capacity planning models can convert forecasts for volume, Average Handle Time (AHT), and shrinkage into the required number of full-time equivalents (FTE’s) needed to handle a Contact Center’s workload, allowing managers to predict staffing excesses and deficits.
Managers can proactively plan to ensure the right number of people are available at all times by using existing Workforce Management functions— such as short-term forecasting, scheduling, and real-time management in conjunction with a well-grounded capacity planning model. The resources and continual cadence that a workforce management department invests in building out this process will pay off in upcoming years.
Our Approach
The Northridge Group helps clients improve their Workforce Management capacity plans with these best practices:
- Assuring collaboration between Workforce Management and Operations teams
- Monthly reforecasting
- Realistic forecasting using trends and not goals
- Accounting for shrinkage and attrition
Our Solutions
Capacity Planning
Although there are many challenges to consider, staffing for success can best be accomplished with a capacity planning model that allows for proactive and accurate forecasting of staffing needs.
We offer Contact Center capacity planning services such as:
Assessment
Design and implementation support for long-term capacity planning
Capacity planning tool audit, development and/or cadence
WFM as a service

Northridge Success
Workforce Management Process Redesign Drives Improved Service and 13% Cost Savings for Fortune 50 Healthcare Enterprise
The client was challenged by highly variable work volumes, complex client-specific service requirements, regulatory pressures, and significant industry transformation. Contact center performance was inconsistent, resulting in inefficiencies and increased costs.
Our Solutions
The Northridge Group helps clients strike a balance in capacity planning.
Contact Center managers continuously face the difficult challenges of balancing too much vs. too little capacity and anticipating the budget implications that will result from their forecasting decisions. While capacity planning is difficult, it is essential for meeting current and future business needs. We can help!
Northridge Perspectives

Improving Customer Experience by Empowering A Compassionate Workforce
Empathy is a desirable trait for customer service associates; however, compassion takes empathy to the next level. While an empathetic associate will try to comfort a customer, who calls in with an issue, a compassionate associate will not only offer comfort but go...

Best Practices of Great Coaches
Customer loyalty is earned by being great and consistent at the basics and finding ways to delight your customers in unexpected ways. Coaching contact center associates to drive a differentiated customer experience that delights customers is a tall order for their...

“Digital First” and Transforming the Contact Center Associate’s Role
One thing we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is that people love ordering products and services online. The age of “digital first” interactions—in which customers encounter businesses online rather than through traditional phone or in-person channels—is here,...
Additional Contact Center Management Services
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