It sounds like the opening line of a joke: How many customer service reps do you need to run an effective contact center? According to experts at ICMI, however, customer experience (CX) leaders can’t afford to treat the answer like a punchline.
Late last month the provider of contact center consulting, training and events research hosted a live virtual event to discuss findings from its 2026 State of the Contact Center report. While the research looked at everything from the agent experience to the impact of AI, the need for better forecasting and capacity planning emerged as the biggest issue.
“If you don’t get (capacity planning) right in the beginning, you can be in a whole world of hurtin’ within three to six months, ” said Steve Campbell, a senior management consultant with Team Rebus and a senior ICMI business associate. “Forecasting is a gap. It’s not a sophisticated feature in workforce management platforms and many contact centers don’t do a great job of building out capacity plans.”
Forecasting and capacity planning has become more complex as contact centers deploy AI, of course. As ICMI principal analyst Daniel Thomas pointed out, the technology is shifting human agents from triage and ticket resolution into becoming the “proactive customer intelligence nervous system” and a vital partner to the business.
With AI doing many of the “fetch and find” tasks Thomas added, human agents are being reserved for more emotionally complex nuanced conversations.
The need for activity-level analysis
To Campbell, this calls for a greater emphasis on understanding contact center work based on activity level analysis where managers assess what employees do by task type, volume and the time they take to complete a task.
“(Activity-based visibility) will allow you to build accurate staffing models,” he said. “It’s going to allow you to quantify the impact of change. When the business comes and says they want to deploy a new technology or pursue AI automation, it’s important to be ablet to go back to them and say this is what the impact will be.”
Josh Streets, CEO of QX Now and a senior ICMI practice lead as well as one of its AI certification instructors, said workforce management teams should be developing a whole new level of reporting. This might include measuring the containment rate for customer issues that AI tools take on, for example.
“The sooner you can get that team upskilled on AI strategy, the better off you’re going to be,” he said.
How to bring in cross-functional teams
Forecasting and capacity planning can’t be limited to those managing contact centers, Campbell added. “The most effective organizations are bringing in cross-functional groups to these conversations,” such as marketing and billing functions, he said. That way they don’t get blindsided by a product launch or something other factor that affects the volume of work.
“It also works in reverse: the contact center can share trends with those groups, whether that’s rising call drivers in this area, or customer confusion in this area,” he said.
Beyond reviewing capacity plans with stakeholders, CX leaders should ensure everyone signs off on them as a team, Campbell advised. If the volume of work or other KPIs fall outside of an acceptable threshold, figure out why.
Check for DITKA
Any additional reporting needs to be handled carefully before it’s distributed, Streets cautioned. He recalled a client he dealt with in the 2010s that produced some 92 different contact center reports. He suggested CX leaders consider the data, insight, training, knowledge and action (DITKA) that reports bring forward, with an emphasis on the “action” aspect.
“You have to figure out if (a particular report) means new training, new hires, or knowledge sharing of some kind,” he said. “Ask yourself: what is this driving?”
The 45-minute ICMI virtual event can be viewed on demand in its entirety through BrightTalk and also delves into areas like how to improve contact center employee retention.