Create forecasts - Amazon Connect

Create forecasts

Forecasts are a projection of the workload in your contact center. Amazon Connect provides long-term and short-term forecasts for you to generate capacity plans and agent schedules. The forecasts include inbound, transfer, and callback contacts in both voice and chat channels.

After creating a forecast, you will not need to generate it manually.

  • Long-term forecasts are generated for 64 weeks and automatically updated every day.

  • Short-term forecasts are generated for 18 weeks, updated every 15 minutes, and they run automatically every day.

  • Every forecast is computed using the most current contact data.

  • The models for short-term and long-term forecasts are retrained on a weekly and monthly basis, respectively, to incorporate the latest contact patterns.

  • You can delete forecasts. However, downstream capacity plans and schedules created based on the forecasts will be impacted.

To create a forecast

  1. Before creating a forecast, you must create at least one forecast group. If you haven't done that, see Create forecast groups. We strongly recommend creating all of your forecast groups before creating any forecasts.

  2. Log in to the Amazon Connect admin website with an account that has security profile permissions for Analytics, Forecasting - Edit.

    For more information, see Assign permissions.

  3. On the Amazon Connect navigation menu, select Analytics and optimization, Forecasting.

  4. Select the Forecast tab, and then choose Create Forecast.

  5. On the Create Forecast page, choose the forecast groups.

    The Create forecast page, the Forecast groups dropdown menu.

  6. Choose the forecast type. Amazon Connect creates a forecast for each type you select.

    • Long-term forecasts are used for capacity planning. For example, how many Full Time Equivalent (FTE) agents you need to hire in the next few months, quarter, and year.

    • Short-term forecasts are used for scheduling agents and interval level agent headcount estimation.

  7. Choose Save. If the forecast group has already been included in a forecast, an error message is displayed.

  8. If the forecast was created successfully, it's Status = Scheduled.

    The status is Complete when the computation finishes. You can use Search to find forecasts by forecast group name.

  9. Amazon Connect creates a forecast for each forecast type, as shown in the following image.

    A list of forecasts, short-term and long-term.