Systems and methods in an electronic contact management system to estimate required staff levels for multi-skilled agents

An electronic contact management system for managing a plurality of electronic multimedia contacts and a plurality of multi-skilled agents comprising:

• an automatic contact distribution system including a contact routing platform to allocate at least some of the plurality of electronic multimedia contacts to suitable agents of the plurality of agents on an appropriate communications medium;
• a historical database coupled to the automatic contact distribution system which stores records of customer and agent interactions;
• an adapter, coupled to the historical database through a communications network and coupled to a workforce management database, which regularly updates the workforce management database with records of agents and customer contact management from the historical database;
• a forecaster, coupled to the workforce management database, which uses historical data from the workforce management database to produce forecasts of types and amounts of future customer contacts predicted to arrive at the contact management system on a future date and of how long an agent will take to service the future customer contacts, and which stores the forecasts in the workforce management database;
• a scheduler, coupled to the workforce management database, which creates future agent work schedules for the future date and sores the agent work schedules;
• a simulator, coupled to the workforce management database, which models the automatic contact distribution system including simulating how long a future customer contact will be served by an agent, which contacts are routed to which agents, and duration of agent-contact interaction using the forecasts and the schedules produced by the scheduler to simulate future performance by the automatic contact distribution system on the future date and stores results of the future performance simulation;
• a required staff controller, coupled to the simulator, which controls the simulator to estimate service quality to be experienced by future contacts by controlling the simulator to determine upper and lower bounds for future agent staffing required to meet service quality goals at the future date;
• and
• a workstation including a computer, a monitor, and input/output devices, coupled to the forecaster, the scheduler, the simulator, and the required staff controller, for pen fitting a workforce planner to interact with the system to obtain forecasts of amounts and types of future contacts expected to arrive on future dates, and to create and maintain work schedules for the future date.