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Every channel is its own planning problem
ccPlanning academy · channel planning
Every channel is its own planning problem
Most planning theory is secretly about phone calls. The rest of the world isn’t.
Slides done? Here’s the same idea in a bit more depth — the part worth keeping.
In depth: most planning theory is secretly about phone calls
Erlang, service level in seconds, intraday profiles — almost all classic planning was built for the inbound phone call. Apply that mental model unchanged to outbound, email, chat or social and you’ll mis-plan every one of them. The inbound-voice bias is so deeply baked into the discipline that the first job of channel planning is simply to notice it and resist it; each channel needs its own lens.
The five things that change
Channel to channel, five things vary: who starts the contact (you or the customer), whether it’s live or deferrable, how many an agent handles at once (concurrency), how long it lasts and whether that’s even measurable, and what “good service” means. Change those and the maths, the metrics and the staffing all change with them. Two axes do most of the sorting — direction (inbound vs outbound) and timing (real-time vs deferrable) — and they alone put voice, outbound, chat, email and social in very different boxes.
A quick map, and the danger
Outbound is driven by contact rates and regulation; webchat is live but concurrent; email and processing are deferrable and throughput-based; messaging is async with sessions spanning days; social is public, spiky and reputational. The most common multi-channel mistake is running all of them through the call-centre playbook — staffing email to a service level, ignoring chat concurrency, treating outbound like inbound — and each wrong fit quietly wastes money or misses service. The rest of this track takes each channel in turn; the unifying move is to match the method to the channel rather than the habit.
The principle to remember: plan each channel on its own terms. Ask of every one — who starts it, is it live or deferrable, what’s the concurrency, and what does good look like? Those answers, not voice-shaped tradition, should drive the plan.
Quick quiz
Five questions. Pick an answer to each, then check your score.
1. What is the ‘inbound-voice bias’?
Erlang, SL-in-seconds and intraday profiles are voice-shaped — each other channel needs its own lens.
2. Which of these varies from channel to channel?
Change those and the maths, metrics and staffing all change.
3. What are the two big axes that separate channels?
Those two axes put voice, outbound, chat, email and social in very different boxes.
4. Where does email/processing sit on the map?
Email is deferrable — planned on throughput against a deadline, not a live service level.
5. What’s the most common multi-channel mistake?
Each wrong fit quietly wastes money or misses service — match the method to the channel.
Related: Blended & multi-channel forecasting covers the concept; this track does each channel in practice.