Lokad news - Integrated business forecasting

Forecasting is important for many industries, but it is critical for the call center industry. Indeed. too much staff and the expenses get out of control. Too few staff and your customers are driven nuts by the long waiting queues.

Call Center Calculator (L3C) is a windows reporting application targeting call center managers to help them optimizing their call centers. The two main features of L3C are call volume forecasts (through Lokad) and staff level optimization (through Erlang C).

In this V1, L3C does not natively support yet many 3^rd party applications for call activity logs retrieval. Yet, we provide an Excel import format (because many call center applications support exporting data toward Excel) and a dedicated SQL query editor if you want to directly import data from a database.

The V1 does not handle events (typically marketing events), yet it is possible to manually tweak the staff level suggestions. This feature will be considered for later versions.

Don't hesitate to tell us what you think, what would be the most needed features and/or the most important 3^rd party applications that we need to support. We do our best to address all customer requests.

We have just published public phone numbers for USA and France. Granted, telephone isn't new or even high-tech and there was actually no good reason for Lokad not to support customer phone calls right from the start. Yet, better late than never.

We are currently relying on a small call center setup based on Skype and PrettyMay. It might not be suited for large companies, but if you don't to need to handle more than 30 concurrent calls, then this is definitely a nice solution.

We have started to work on Lokad Call Center Calculator (L3C). This application will be the successor of Lokad Desktop Workload Forecasting. Yet, L3C will be completely dedicated to the call center industry.

Among the key features that we are pushing forward for the first release:

• Retrieve historical data, such as call volumes and staff levels from your call center application.
• Visualize your data with filters such as day of the week (useful when it comes to compare the forecasts with comparable data over the last few weeks).
• Adjust call center queue settings such as expected service level or speed of answer, average call duration and wrap-up time.
• Convert incoming call volumes into staffing level suggestions with an embedded variant of the Erlang C formula.
• Edit staffing levels, if staffing suggestions need to be corrected.
• Export planned call volumes and staffing levels toward 3rd party applications.

We are already considering a native support for a couple of 3rd party applications such as Vicidial, Viev, QueueMetrics ...

Like the other Lokad products, L3C will be released as open-source. Do not hesitate to make your own feature requests.

We are proud to announce that we have released the first version of Desktop Workload Forecasting. This application is primarily oriented toward call center managers.

In a nutshell, optimizing staffing levels is a cornerstone of call center management; and forecasting future workloads (i.e. forecasting inbound call volume) is the key to get the right amount of staff at the right time.

This application is somehow similar to the Desktop Sales Forecasting. The two applications share a similar architecture and look & feel. Yet, workload forecasting needs shorter periods, and Desktop Workload Forecasting supports hour, half-hour and quarter-hour forecasts.

Desktop Workload Forecasting can retrieve historical inbound call volumes from VICIDIAL, a popular client for Asterisk open-source PBX. The application has been designed to be easily extended to support other applications as well. Do not hesitate to contact us if you want your favorite call center application to be supported by Lokad.

Sometime small changes makes a large difference. Lokad has been supporting hourly forecasts since December 2006; and we introduce two new periods: half-hour and quarter-hour. Those periods have been introduced to support call centers workload forecasting.

Yet those two additional periods are only the tip of the iceberg of the actual changes within Lokad. Basically, we have improved our forecasting algorithms in the context of call center forecasting, and more generally, of staff scheduling.

Typically, call volume forecasts are used in conjunction with formulas from the queuing theory (the Erlang C formula being a very popular choice in the call center business). Given a forecasted call volume, and some service-related constraints (such as the average waiting time), it becomes possible to compute the exact amount of required personnel.

At this point, we do not have yet any integration add-on readily available to support existing call center management software. If you want your favorite application to be supported by Lokad, do not hesitate to contact us.