Using Outliers and Adjustments for Forecasting accuracy – Assembled

This feature is a part of Assembled's Pro and Enterprise plans.

While we aim to generate an accurate forecast right out of the box, no one knows your team or business better than you do. If you have the need to adjust your forecast based on events that you know are coming, or some confidential business information, you'll be able to do that with our Forecast Adjustment feature.

What scenarios can you use this for?

Say you have a product launch and expect that to drive support volume by 50%. You can go in and add that adjustment to your launch date.
Maybe you had an outage today. You can add an outlier and make sure the inflated volume from today doesn't affect your forecast in the future.

Some key terms

Outlier: a timeframe that you can highlight to be excluded from the forecasting model. This is usually an unexpected event, such as an outage driving an unusual support ticket volume.
Adjustment: an alteration to the forecast. Say you have a product launch that you expect to be driving 50% more volume, or maybe there's a market holiday that you expect will depress the contact volume by 30%.
Forecast Algorithm: this will default to your current forecasting model. Should you be interested in how another model would forecast, you can select it from the dropdown menu and visualize it. It will not change the staffing forecast model.
Start/End: this is to control what range of days you'll see to the right pane.
Channel: the channel you're planning on adding an adjustment or outlier to.
Queue: the queue you're planning on adding an adjustment or outlier to. If you don't select a queue, you'll add the adjustment or outlier to the channel.

Adding an Adjustment

You have the option to add the adjustment to all queues in all channels or to an individual queue in a particular channel.

To add adjustments to all the queues, click Add adjustments.
To add an adjustment to a particular queue:

Select the channel the queue is in.
Select the queue.
Click Add adjustment.

In the adjustment modal, you'll need to add:

Holiday/event: this will be a description of the event affecting the forecast.
Start time: the start date and start time of this adjustment.
End time: the end date and time of this adjustment.
Change by: the factor by which you'd like to change the current forecast. This can be a percentage, say 50%, or an exact value, say 5000 contacts. Adding a percentage will multiply your unadjusted forecast (base forecast) by that percentage at every 15 minute interval. Adding an exact value will add that number to your base forecast at every 15 minute interval. So, for example, adding an exact value of 10 for a day will add 960= 24 hrs * 10 * 4.
Add: this adds your adjustment, but it doesn't save it just yet.

Once the adjustment is added, you'll be able to see its effect in the window to the right. We'll show you the base forecast, your adjusted forecast, and a highlighted portion of the forecast where your adjustment has been applied. You can edit your adjustments and refine the changes. When you're happy with the adjustment, you'll need to hit "Save config" to make sure your changes are applied.

Adding an outlier

You have the option to add an outlier to all queues in all channels or to an individual queue in a particular channel.

To add adjustments to all the queues, click Add outliers.
To add an adjustment to a particular queue:

Select the channel the queue is in.
Select the queue.
Click Add outlier.

In the outlier card, you'll need to add:

Event: this will be a description of the event you want to designate an outlier.
Start time: the start date and start time of this outlier.
End time: the end date and time of this outlier.
Add: this adds your outlier, but it doesn't save it just yet.

You'll be able to see the timeline you've designated as an outlier in the window to the right if you tick the box saying "Show in chart". You can adjust the times and dates on the outlier, and, when you're happy with it, you need to hit "Save config" to make sure everything is saved. That's it!

If you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear it! You can reach us at support@assembledhq.com.

Video Tutorial

Using Adjustments and Outliers

Open video in Loom

Thank you, Sam! I am clear on the difference between adjustment and outlier now.