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User guide for L3C

This guide will help you to understand the features provided by Lokad Call Center Calculator (L3C).

This application targets call center or contact center managers who need to optimize their staff levels and their service levels.

Big picture

L3C features staff level optimization reports. In order to produce the reports, L3C depends on two other applications:

• a call center application where the inbound call activity is recorded. L3C can retrieve the data directly frm several 3^rd party applications.
• the Lokad forecasting services that forecasts the call volumes. The inbound call volumes are first uploaded to Lokad (data being obfuscated beforehand), and the call volume forecasts are downloaded from Lokad.

Thanks to Lokad, L3C computes, in a completely automated manner, optimized staff levels for your call center.

L3C is an open-source application (so the application itself is free), but it requires a Lokad subscription plan to enable the forecast retrieval.

Setting up a report

Start L3C and click on File » New. The report setup wizard appears. This wizard will guide you while defining your report settings.

Lokad settings

The first wizard panel is named Lokad Account Settings. You need to enter the same login and password that you are using to access your Lokad account.

If you intend to have several call center reports (ex: you are managing several call centers based on different software), then you should specify a different Series prefix for each report. This prefix is used to avoid call queue name collisions within your Lokad account.

Unless you are a developer hacking into L3C, we suggest you do not change the WS URL or the task name.

Call center report settings

The second wizard panel is named Call Center Report Properties. This panel let you define the type of report that you want.

The Period defines the level of aggregation used in the report (ex: hour, half-hour, quarter-hour). We suggest to use the period that is the most practical to address your business requirements.

The Past week count indicates how much historical data will be displayed in the report. Note that this settings has no impact on the forecasts. Our forecasting algorithms will always consider all the available data (and not restrict themselves to the displayed data). In practice we suggest to display between 1 and 3 weeks of historical data.

The Future week count indicates how far the forecasts (and thus the staff levels) will go in the future. At this time, this settings is limited to 1 or 2 weeks.

Data Adapter

The third and fourth wizard panels are the Data Adapter Type, which let you choose your call center application (when the call activity data will be retrieved from) and the Data Adapter Connection Settings that you enter specific settings to access the data of your call center application (typically, a database connection string).

If your business application does not appear in the list, do not hesitate to drop us an email at support@lokad.com. We will see what we can do to support your application as well.

Default queue settings

In order to generate staff level suggestions, L3C need some additional information about the call queues of your call center. The sixth wizard panel named Default Queue Settings let you provide this information. At a later stage, once the queues will have been imported in the report, you will be able to separately adjust those settings for each queue.

The Service level is a percentage indicating the ratio of incoming calls that must be answered with the Expected speed of answers delay. Naturally, the higher the service level, the more staff you need. The longer the speed of answer, the less staff you need.

The Average call duration and the Average wrap-up duration indicates how much time your call center operators are spending for each incoming call. If there is no wrap-up after the call, you can set the wrap-up duration at zero.

Tip: save your report. After completing the report setup wizard, we suggest to save the report using File » Save' to be sure not to loose your settings.

Generating the report

Once you have completed the report setup wizard (see the previous section for more details), you need to generate your report by clicking the Refresh button. This button will start a complete refresh of your report - retrieving the latest call activity data and the latest forecasts.

Note that the full refresh takes over 1h, mostly due to the fact that the forecasts retrieval is delayed of 1h after the upload toward Lokad. Check our small guide to forecasts retrieval for more details.

You can also perform a manual / partial report refresh through Tools » Partial refresh operations.

Controls in the main view

The default view of L3C includes quite a few controls (check this report screenshot). This section explains the purpose of those controls.

Call queue: Next to the Refresh button, on its right, there is a drop down listing that contains all the queues as retrieved from your call center application. L3C treats each queue separately since each queue is very likely to need its own staffing schedule. You can select the active queue through this drop-down button.

Volumes vs. Agents: Below the Refresh button, there is a radio box that let you select either Volumes or Agents. If Volumes is selected, then the report displays inbound the call volumes associated to the active queue. If Agents is selected then, then the report displays the number of operators associated to the active queue.

Queue settings: For each queue, you can define a couple of settings such as the service level or the expected speed of answer. See the section here above for more details about those settings. Once you have changed those settings, you need to click on Refresh in order to let those new settings come into effect.

Forecasted checkbox: The checkbox forecasted indicates whether you want the queue to be forecasted or not. Indeed, your call center software might contain queues that are not active any more, and that do not need to be forecasted.

Understanding the numbers

The report has two display modes Volumes and Agents that respectively display (as the names suggest) numbers of incoming calls and numbers of call center agents.

Volumes

Call volumes are displayed with one column per day. In the column header, a short date along with the day of the week are displayed.

This historical call volumes are displayed over a yellow background. The forecasted call volumes are displayed over an orange background.

Agents

Agents are displayed in a way that is quite similar to the call volumes.

Tip: you can quickly switch from volumes to agents by hitting F2.

The historical agent levels are displayed over a yellow background. Depending on your call center application, this information might not be retrieved. In such a situation, agent counts are left at zero.

The suggested (planned) agent levels are displayed over an orange background. Those suggestions are based on forecasted call volumes and queue settings. L3C uses the Erlang C formula to compute optimized staff levels.

Tip: you can manually edit staff levels, when you know that an event will impact the call center activity

You can manually modify the planned agent levels by directly editing the corresponding cells. When you modify the number of agents, the old primary suggestion appears in the cell between parenthesis. This reminds you of the original number.

When performing a cut-and-paste to an Excel spreadsheet (for example), it's usually practical to hide those numbers between parenthesis. You can do so through Tools » Hide Computed Agent Counts.