SPEAKER:  Nathaniel Derby, Statistician, Statis Pro Data Analytics

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TITLE: Forecasting Methods for Call Centers

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ABSTRACT:
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Forging the link between more and more big businesses and their customers, call
centers are becoming an essential part of Corporate America.  As such,
forecasting call demand (how many calls they will get) is crucial for hiring and
scheduling the right number of call center operators:
Too few operators causes callers to wait too long on the phone and become
dissatisfied.Too many operators causes unnecessarily large labor costs.
Despite this importance on forecast accuracy, many call centers still "forecast
by eyeball" on Excel spreadsheets, which sometimes works well and sometimes does
not.  This talk describes an attempt to address this problem with statistical
techniques