Your 2025 workforce forecasting guide: Predict, plan, and adapt

When it comes to operating a contact center, one of the most challenging tasks is accurately predicting how much staff you’ll need and making sure you always have enough agents to handle customer demands—without risking inefficiencies like overstaffing.

But it’s impossible to predict the future. So, how can you do workforce forecasting effectively?

Having operated a global contact center team that provides 24/7 customer support for years—in addition to building a WFM platform with workforce forecasting features, our team at Dialpad is in a unique position where we can see firsthand what agents and supervisors need to do their jobs effectively on a day-to-day basis. 

Keep reading to learn more about the complexities of forecasting in workforce management, best practices that we’ve found helpful, and tools that can make forecasting easier.

What is workforce forecasting?

Workforce forecasting is a strategic practice that involves analyzing historical data, current patterns, and external factors to estimate a company’s future workforce composition and requirements.

For operations management in contact centers, the factors that typically need to be considered are:  

• long-term workload and workforce forecasting, 

• mid-term scheduling of agents, 

• short-time allocation of agents to a range of tasks or services, 

• real-time routing of calls to agents according to their skill set

In a nutshell, workforce forecasting predicts the right number of employees with specific skills needed to serve different customer groups.

How workforce forecasting works

Forecasting, in a call center workforce management context, involves systematically overseeing talent flow within an organization to efficiently handle the recruitment, training, development, and succession of employees—while making sure all of this aligns with your business goals. 

There are two primary ways to approach this:

• Operational workforce forecasting, which looks at your needs from a day-to-day perspective—it’s more short-term (think seasonal demand) and focused on immediate operational needs

• Strategic workforce forecasting, which takes a long-term, birds-eye view of your workforce needs—here, you’re trying to anticipate things like market shifts and changes in your industry’s landscape

But regardless of which approach you take, there are some key questions to consider asking:

1. What are our historical call volumes and patterns? 

2. Are there any upcoming events or promotions that may impact call volumes?

3. What are the average conversation handling times for different channels?

4. What is the expected growth rate of call and messaging volumes? 

5. What are the planned changes in operational hours or shifts?

6. How effective is the current call routing system? 

7. What are our attrition rates and expected hiring plans?

8. Do we have any training or upskilling programs planned?

9. What are our service level objectives and customer satisfaction targets?

10. What are the available workforce management tools and technologies?

Examples of workforce forecasting

Operational forecasting example

Say you’re a supervisor in a bank’s contact center. You know your busy periods are almost always the first, middle, and end of every month because you need to process payments from customers. So, you make sure you schedule more agents to be available during these dates.

Strategic forecasting example

Now, let’s say you manage a SaaS company’s contact center and you know that your product roadmap is going heavy on Ai features over at least the next two years. You’re anticipating that more and more customers will contact you to learn more about what new Ai functionality your software will have, how it impacts their data security and privacy, or just to know how they’ll work.

So, you consider putting together a team of agents who are Ai-savvy and prepare them to come online as Ai-related questions ramp up—and also start coming up with additional training and development programs so that the entire team can uplevel their Ai skills and knowledge over the next few years.

What are the benefits of workforce forecasting?

Good workforce forecasting can give your business an edge over your competitors in many important ways. Here are a few of them:

More strategic workforce planning

Workforce forecasting is critical in effective workforce planning because it helps you match staffing demands and availability with long-term business objectives. It also makes it easier for managers to determine skill deficits, forecast future labor needs, and create focused recruitment, training, and succession programs.

Talent retention and development

Workforce forecasting is also valuable in that it helps teams engage in employee retention and development programs, and project future talent demands. If you’re able to recognize possible skill shortages or gaps, you can proactively establish programs to upskill your existing agents, which increases employee engagement and satisfaction and may lower attrition rates.

Increased agility and adaptability

Another benefit of workforce planning is it prepares your business to foresee market shifts, customer needs, and technology improvements, which then enables you to adjust or improve your workforce’s skill sets accordingly. 

With Ai and other industry trends taking hold, this ability to be flexible in your staff planning is crucial for adapting quickly to new possibilities and effectively managing risks in a volatile environment.

More efficient workforce deployment

Being able to accurately estimate future talent demands makes it easier to assign the right employees to the right tasks, divisions, and business areas. The end result: you’ll be able to maximize your team’s efficiency, de-risk, and improve your operational effectiveness.

Workforce forecasting best practices

Now, let’s look at some best practices to keep in mind when doing workforce forecasting:

1. Set your KPIs

Set KPIs to monitor the effectiveness of your contact center’s workforce forecasting strategies. These KPIs might include metrics such as employee headcount, retention rate, advancement rate, tenure, quality of hiring, voluntary vs. involuntary departure rate, and eNPS.

2. Make it a collaborative process

Include essential stakeholders in the forecasting process, like your agents, HR stakeholders, department managers, and executives. This collaborative input will offer a more complete picture of your workforce’s requirements and make sure you’re aligned with the company’s broader objectives.

3. Evaluate regularly and adjust if needed

Forecasting demand for a workforce is a continuous task. Set a reminder if you need to, to track and assess your projections against actual results on a regular basis, and make adjustments as needed. Dialpad’s workforce forecasting models, for example, can analyze your historical data and then estimate the number of interactions your team will likely receive in the next 12 weeks.

It also lets you break down how your coverage and contact volumes are dispersed by queue:

4. Integrate your talent management strategies

Workforce forecasting should be integrated with talent management activities such as recruiting, learning, development, and retention programs. 

By coordinating these tactics, you can ensure a smooth shift from forecast to execution, and maximize the efficacy of your personnel planning efforts.

5. Leverage your data

Data will help you make more informed judgments and provide a solid rationale for staffing strategies. 

To acquire these insights and drive your workforce planning process more efficiently, look at critical indicators such as existing staffing numbers, retention rates, promotion rates, time-to-hire times, and other variables.

In Dialpad WFM, there’s a comparing feature that lets you directly compare historical data. Just use the date selector to choose any date in the past, then select Same period from the Compare Actuals menu. This will show you the actual contact volume received for that period and the number of agents you needed to handle those interactions:

Key components of workforce forecasting

Here are four key elements that typically show up in an effective workforce forecasting strategy:

1. Historical data analysis

Historical analysis involves reviewing previous workforce data, such as staff demographics, attrition rates, recruitment patterns, and performance indicators. These past trends, practices, and interactions will be useful for building accurate estimates of future talent requirements. Of course, a caveat to keep in mind is that this method assumes that past patterns will repeat themselves in future workforce patterns. It’s usually best to use historical data as a starting point, and adjust your forecast numbers based on anticipated changes in your industry: 

• Seasonal patterns: These are the regularly recurring busy and not-so-busy periods that happen every year. Examples include seasonal sales (if you’re a retail business), where you’d need additional staff on a temporary basis.

• Employee turnover trends: Knowing how many employees are leaving is vital for hiring and managing schedules, and also managing costs related to hiring and onboarding.

• Skills gap insights: Do your agents need to be trained on how to use Ai tools (or communicate how your business’ Ai products work)? Are you serving customers in countries but don’t have enough multilingual agents to support that demand? This data will help you fill those gaps effectively and know where to focus your hiring and training efforts.

2. External factors consideration

Besides historical patterns, good forecasting also takes into account factors outside your company—and outside your control. For example:

• Economic trends: The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of an event that significantly impacted the economy, but general economic trends like unemployment and GDP may also factor into your workforce forecasting.

• Industry insights: Have there been mass shifts toward—or away—from certain types of products or offerings? Maybe your top competitor is doing something different from the pack.

• Technological changes: For now, the technological change with the biggest impact on contact center teams is likely Ai. There are Ai-powered forecasting and scheduling tools, Ai-powered translation and summarization features for agents, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Your workforce forecasting tool should be able to let you adjust your forecasts based on unanticipated or external factors. For example, with Dialpad WFM you can manually adjust forecasts when things like marketing campaigns, product launches, or price changes happen:

3. Internal factors consideration

Finally, workforce forecasting also needs to factor in your business goals and operations:

• Organizational growth goals: If your business has ambitious growth goals, you may need to scale up your workforce to support those plans.

• Projected changes in business operations: For example, if you want to automate customer support on digital channels—or shift to digital channels—you’ll need to adjust your forecasting and scheduling to increase support on messaging channels.

• Employee turnover rates: This is a crucial consideration as well. If your contact center is experiencing higher turnover than expected, you may need to increase investment in hiring and onboarding to align with your forecasts and support a workforce that’s big enough to maintain business performance.

Workforce forecasting methods and techniques

You can use the components above in a few ways—there are different workforce forecasting techniques for predicting your staffing needs. Here are a few of them:

1. Quantitative methods

• Trend analysis: Uses patterns and historical data (like past call volumes and staff attrition rates).

• Regression analysis: Looks specifically at how variables independent of your workforce (e.g., the economy, industry shifts) will impact your workforce’s needs.

• Time series analysis: Similar to trend analysis—uses time-bound historical patterns to highlight seasonal trends for specific time periods.

2. Qualitative methods

• Expert opinions and Delphi method: Creates forecasts based on the feedback and opinions of experts in your industry.

Scenario planning: Predicts workforce demands by coming up with different scenarios to show the range of potential staffing requirements. For example, say you have a fixed headcount and are willing to tolerate slower response times. But you’re worried about building up too big of a backlog. With scenario planning, you don’t need to hire more people. You can identify what first response time might be tolerable for you (maybe you pick up your calls in three minutes rather than 60 seconds, or reply to emails within 10 hours instead of five).

Dialpad WFM has a scenario planning features that’s designed to help with this forecasting method:

• Simulation and sensitivity analysis: Simulation is when teams model or simulate different workforce scenarios to assess how variables might change and impact forecasts. Sensitivity analysis builds on this and examines how these changes in variables will impact forecasts holistically.

3. Hybrid approaches

• Demand-driven method: Uses both past data and employee feedback to take into account factors like attrition and skills reallocation.

• Technology-infused method: Uses trend analysis and expert opinions on new technology and tools to incorporate emerging technologies in forecasting.

• Market expansion method: Uses scenario planning and regression analysis to support a growth-focused forecasting strategy, which may involve increased investment in hiring and training in addition to higher staffing forecasts.

4. Causal method

The causal method is similar to a few of the methods mentioned earlier, but it’s unique in that it uses hyper-specific past data about different variables in your forecasting strategy, and is powerful enough to take special events formally into account—in other words, finding causal relationships between seemingly unrelated data.

For example, a healthcare practice might use a workforce forecasting model that predicts staffing needs based on the anticipated increase of new residents in town over the age of 55.

What is workforce forecasting software?

Workforce forecasting software is an application that uses past data and algorithms or models to predict staffing needs for a team or business and anticipate how they’ll fluctuate.

Dialpad WFM, for example, comes with many forecasting features, such as automated forecasting and the ability to forecast staffing requirements for every channel, tier, and inbox:

You can also set SLAs, shrinkage, AHT, and more to accurately forecast and schedule your team.

Automate your workforce forecasting with Dialpad

To manage your contact center effectively, you need the right forecasting and scheduling tools.

Dialpad WFM can help you streamline company processes and optimize scheduling, while providing excellent customer service. Book a product tour to get a hands-on look at how it works!