Customizing staffing calculations – Assembled
Assembled handles the heavy lifting as far as calculating the staffing requirements to meet your customers' demands. Specifically, our algorithms help you determine how many people you need to staff per channel and per queue at any given time. Of course, every business is unique, and so our algorithms can be customized to meet your response time targets and account for your handle times.
A couple of things to note:
From the Staffing timeline, select the Configure staffing button to customize response time targets and handle times. The button is only selectable when a specific Channel is selected. The Configure staffing button takes into account the assumptions that you make about how your team will work throughout the day.
The default configured staffing parameters option is Manually configured productivity, which uses a preset value. You may override this value or choose to leverage Dynamic productivity, which uses your historical data to predict the value for each interval in our SLA/staffing calculations.
Configurations are specific to each channel and queue pairing. For example, general issues that arrive via phone can be distinguished from specialist tickets that arrive via email.
Users can also manually input values. Conduct what-if analyses to see how a change in targets would affect staffing requirements with the Test scenario feature. This allows you to individually preview changes without permanently saving them.
When your analysis is complete, select Save configuration to apply the changes and generate an updated set of forecasts and requirements, which will be visible across the entire account.
Important note about staffing parameters and required staffing numbers: When adjusting your variables for your Email channel, Assembled does not adjust the required staffing numbers but does adjust the forecasts. The reason for this is that staffing requirements still assume that you want to try to get to emails as soon as possible. However, using our email backlog visualization feature, you can easily see how changing these variables and your staffing impacts your email backlog.
Words used in the configure staffing panel
Service level The percentage of contacts who receive a response within the designated target response time.
Target response time The target response time, in seconds, for determining the Service Level (this is set to hours for email).
Average handle time (AHT) Average time required to handle a contact, in seconds.
Concurrency
The number of simultaneous contacts an agent handles, on average.
Shrinkage In Assembled, this does not refer to all non-productive time or time off (such as PTO, sick leave, breaks, or meetings). These should be scheduled separately. Instead, shrinkage represents the difference between the amount of scheduled productive time and the amount of actually delivered productive time within the corresponding period.
A common way to determine this value is by subtracting your adherence score from 100%. For example, if your team typically achieves 85% adherence, you would set shrinkage to 15% to account for lost productive time.
In the absence of schedule adherence data, use a benchmark: 5-10% for traditional voice operations, 10-15% for modern Omni-channel teams, and 15%+ for highly complex, digital-first environments. You can refine this as you gather more data.
Email productivity (also called case throughput)
The average number of email contacts handled per agent, per hour.
Minimum staffing
The minimum number of people required to staff at any given time with forecasted volume.
Video tutorial
Customizing your staffing requirements
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