Templates - CCProphet Lite

Today’s contact centers are becoming increasingly complicated.  New technology has brought with it both new opportunities and new complexities.  The advent of skills-based routing, blended operations and multiple points of entry have made management by intuition more and more difficult.  Contact center managers need an accurate means of analysis more than ever, and perhaps even more importantly, they need a method that is dynamic in nature. 

Why? Traditional, static methods for analyzing centers (such as Erlang-based formulas), depend upon assumptions that no longer hold true.  In today’s environment, calls do abandon, every agent isn’t the same, and dynamic routing schemes are the norm.  To handle these situations, you need an analysis method that is as dynamic as your center – in other words, you need simulation.

CCProphet Lite
NovaSim’s CCProphet Lite Template provides a way to get started with building a simple contact center model of your own.  It will also serve as an introduction to just how helpful simulation can be in understanding your call center.  With the lite version, you can:

• View on-screen statistics covering such important benchmarks as:
• Blocked calls
• Abandons
• Queue lengths (number of calls waiting)
• Agent occupancy rates
• Understand how trunk usage varies across the day – What are peak times? How many trunks are used? How many calls will you block if you change the number of trunks available?
• See a detailed table of results for each run, collected by time period.
• Create detailed graphs of call queues, trunk usage and so on.
• Make a distinction between two skill groups.  Each group can have it’s own:
• Talk times
• After call work times
• Staffing schedule by time period
• Allow for two different call types.  For each type, you can specify distinct:
• Abandonment times
• Percentage of total calls
• Enter arrival volumes by time period.
• Select an analysis interval of 15, 30 or 60 minutes.

While simple, this model will give you a flavor for what kind of analysis can be done with call center simulation, and will provide a very useful starting point for the analyst wanting to create his or her own model.  Large and complex call centers will of course require a more complicated model.  You can use this template as a jumping-off point for creating the larger model yourself.  Have a look through the code we’ve created to see how it is done, then expand the model further.  Or you can let our professional call center simulation application do it for you.

Using CCProphet Lite
Using CCProphet Lite is easy.  The simulator has been saved as a SIMUL8 Template file.  Start by opening the file in your copy of SIMUL8.  As the file opens, you will be presented with a Contact Center Wizard.  Simply answer the questions as they appear.  At the end of the wizard, a customized model will be created.  Run the model, examine the results, and learn by exploring the Visual Logic code.  Study the dynamics of the center you’ve created by changing variables and watching how the corresponding results change.  Detailed instructions for using SIMUL8’s basic functionality can be found in your SIMUL8 User’s Guide or within the context sensitive help.     

CCProphet Pro
If you’d rather go straight to a professionally built model that will let you get started analyzing your center right away, we present CCProphet Pro.  This self-contained application uses SIMUL8 as a simulation engine, but is designed with a GUI, a model development wizard and extensive reporting. Its objective is to embed simulation technology within a user-friendly user interface thereby removing the steep learning curve typically involved in building a quality simulation model. A complete wizard-based interview process will ask you a series of questions, in plain English, that will help build the model.  From the answers you give, the application will utilize its built-in knowledge to develop a customized, professional quality simulation application for even the most complicated call center.  Additional powerful features include support for:

• Skills based routing
• Multiple points of entry
• Multiple call types
• Multiple skill groups
• Complicated routing schemes, including queue overflow rules
• Call handling priority schemes
• IVRs
• Extensive reporting
• Much, much more

If you’d like to upgrade to our professional product, we will credit the full price you’ve paid for the lite version. Contact us for more information or for a live demonstration of CCProphet Pro.  You can also visit our website at www.novasim.com, where you will find an extensive FAQ.

About NovaSim
NovaSim was established to focus solely on providing high quality simulation products and professional services.   Professional services include training, support, and simulation consulting services using SIMUL8™ .  Our partners each have 7 or more years applied experience in simulation consulting and graduate degrees in the field.  NovaSim has a particular experience and expertise in the following areas:

• Contacts centers
• Supply chain
• Health care
• Manufacturing

If you would like more information about us, the kind of work we do, how we have helped past clients, and most importantly, how we can help your organization, please contact us.  We also encourage you to explore our website to find out more about simulation in general, and why simulation is so critical for analyzing contact centers in particular.

Contact Information
NovaSim, LLC
1000 Geneva Street
Bellingham, WA 98226
800-538-6394
info@novasim.com
www.novasim.com