The intraday profile

Deep-dive lesson · about 10 minutes · short quiz at the end

ccPlanning academy · forecasting · deep dive

The intraday profile

How a daily total becomes a staffing plan — interval by interval.

The problem

“We’ll get 4,000 contacts Tuesday.” So what?

A daily total tells you almost nothing about how many people to roster. Four thousand contacts spread evenly needs a flat team. The same four thousand bunched into two peaks needs a very different shape.

Staffing happens at the interval level — usually every 15 or 30 minutes.

The definition

The profile is the day’s shape.

The intraday profile is the share of a day’s volume that lands in each interval — a list of percentages that sums to 100%.

9:00–9:15 might be 3.1% of the day; 11:00–11:15 might be 4.8%; 17:30–17:45 might be 1.2%.

The typical shape

Most voice operations have two humps.

Mid-morning peak, a lunch dip, a softer afternoon hump, a long tail.

Why it matters

Same total, two profiles, two plans.

Two days can share an identical daily forecast and need completely different rosters. The profile — not the total — decides where your people have to be.

Building it · step 1

Average each interval across like-days.

Take several weeks of history. For each interval, work out what share of that day’s total it carried. Average those shares across comparable days.

The output is one clean profile — a percentage for every interval.

Building it · step 2

Don’t average days that aren’t alike.

A Monday profile is not a Saturday profile. Many operations have a distinct shape for each day of the week — and sometimes separate profiles for paydays, post-campaign days, or peak season.

Blend a Saturday into your weekday average and you’ll mis-staff both.

Building it · step 3

Normalise so it sums to 100%.

Once you’ve averaged, rescale the intervals so they add to exactly 100%. Now the profile is pure shape — independent of how big any single day was.

That’s what lets you reuse it on any daily forecast.

Applying it

Daily forecast × profile = interval forecast.

Multiply tomorrow’s daily forecast by each interval’s percentage and you have an interval-level volume forecast — the input Erlang needs to tell you headcount.

Trap 1

One profile for every day.

The single most common mistake: applying one all-purpose profile to Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays alike. The daily total can be perfect and your interval staffing still wrong all day.

Trap 2 & 3

Stale profiles and dirty history.

Profiles drift — opening hours change, self-service shifts the peak, customers learn to call later. Refresh them.

And one outage or fire-drill day, left in the average, can dent the shape for months. Clean the history first — the subject of a later lesson.

Make it concrete

4,000 contacts, one interval

If your 09:00–09:15 share is 3.1%, that’s 124 contacts in that interval. The 11:00 peak at 4.8% is 192 — over 50% more in the same fifteen minutes.

Erlang sizes each interval separately, so those two numbers can mean a five- or six-head difference on the floor. That gap is the whole reason the profile exists.

The takeaway

The total tells you how much. The profile tells you when.

Build a profile per day type, keep it normalised to 100%, refresh it, and multiply it onto your daily forecast. That’s how a number becomes a roster.

Now test yourself ↓

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Slides done? Here’s the same idea in a bit more depth — the part worth keeping.

In depth: how a daily total becomes a roster

“We’ll get 4,000 contacts on Tuesday” is a forecast that tells you almost nothing about staffing. Four thousand contacts spread evenly across the day needs a flat team; the same four thousand bunched into two sharp peaks needs a completely different shape. Staffing is decided at the interval level — every 15 or 30 minutes — so the daily total is only useful once you know how it’s distributed across the day. That distribution is the intraday profile, and it’s the bridge between a forecast number and an actual roster.

What the profile is, and how to build it

The profile is simply the share of a day’s volume that lands in each interval — a list of percentages that sums to 100%. You build it by taking several weeks of history, working out what share of each day’s total each interval carried, and averaging those shares across comparable days. That last word matters: a Monday profile is not a Saturday profile, and many operations need a distinct shape per day of the week, plus separate profiles for paydays, post-campaign spikes or peak season. Once averaged, you normalise the profile so it adds to exactly 100% — now it’s pure shape, independent of size, ready to multiply onto any daily forecast.

The three ways it goes wrong

The most common mistake is one all-purpose profile applied to every day — your daily total can be perfect and your interval staffing still wrong from open to close. The second is staleness: profiles drift as opening hours change, self-service moves the peak, and customers learn to call later, so they need refreshing. The third is dirty history — a single outage or fire-drill day left in the average can dent the shape for months, which is why cleaning the history comes first. Get those right and the final step is trivial: tomorrow’s daily forecast times each interval’s percentage gives the interval-level volume that Erlang turns into headcount.

The principle to remember: the total tells you how much, the profile tells you when. Build one per day type, keep it normalised and refreshed, and multiply it onto the daily forecast — that’s how a number becomes a roster.

The intraday profile