Capacity planning in Amazon Connect

A capacity plan helps you estimate the long-term FTE (full-time equivalent) requirements for your contact center, up to 18 months. It specifies how many FTE agents are required to meet the service level target for a certain period of time.

After you generate long term FTE estimations, you can share this information with other stakeholders, such as Human Resources, Finance, and the Training Department, to help facilitate the hiring and training of staff. When a business launches a new product or extends into a new Region, staff hiring is needed to meet the customer service demand.

The capacity planning feature uses published long-term forecasts as input, along with scenario information that you provide. It then creates a long-term capacity plan that you can share with stakeholders. Capacity planning also uses the published short-term forecast when determining the FTE requirements. Short-term forecast is used to identify contact patterns within a day and that helps in determining the maximum number of FTEs that will be needed to meet the service level targets. The following diagram illustrates this integration among published long-term forecasts, capacity planning, and capacity planning output.

Getting started

Following is the order of steps for creating a capacity plan and sharing it with others.

1. Create capacity planning scenarios

2. Import estimated future shrinkage and available full-time employees: This is an optional step but it can improve the accuracy of your capacity plan.

3. Create capacity plans using forecasts and scenarios

4. Create capacity planning scenarios

5. Review, override, re-run, or download a capacity plan.

6. Publish a capacity plan