Schedules are created to ensure the right skilled agents are available at the right time in order meet customer demand.
Inflex is short for inflexibility. As the term indicates, schedule inflex means that there is some amount of inflexibility inherent when you create a schedule that results in the schedule not being able to perfectly cover demand as forecasted.
Correct scheduling is necessary to ensure that over/under situations are minimised. Over scheduling means more agents are scheduled than what is necessary in a period. Under scheduling is when not enough agents are scheduled than necessary.
The following circumstances can affect Schedule Inflex:
- Consistency of Intra-day Demand Profile – The higher the standard deviation between values across the intra-day the higher schedule inflex is likely to be.
- Economies of scale – the greater the workforce pool size the more likely you will be able to slide shifts to meet demand.
- Flexibility of schedule rules – for example scheduling agent in teams will limit flexibility and thus increase schedule inflex.
- Multi-Skilling – being able to pipe demand in and out of an agent pool can help reduce schedule inflex.
- HOOP (Hours of Operation) – a 24hr scheduling window will allow far more flexibility than a 8 hour window of operation.
All these lead to what is known as sched inflex, which can be measured and expressed as a percentage. This tells the scheduler by how much should the net FTE number be buffered up for staffing to meet service levels.
