AWS Contact Center

Elevate your contact center using the new Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling features

Workforce management (WFM) is essential for contact center success. It matches staff levels to call volume patterns, which reduces customer wait times and operational costs. Effective WFM ensures the right agents with the right skills are available all the time to handle customer contact volume. This systematic approach to scheduling maximizes both agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

Amazon Connect forecasting, capacity planning, and scheduling, a feature of Amazon Connect, helps customers to predict, allocate, and verify that the right number of agents are scheduled at the right time to meet their operational goals with minimal overstaffing. The AI-powered capabilities make it easier for contact center supervisors to anticipate contact volumes and average handle time with high accuracy, determine ideal staffing levels, optimize agent schedules, and help supervisors to track schedule adherence. Turning it on takes just a click, eliminating the need to build custom applications or integrate expensive third-party solutions into your contact center. These capabilities help optimize internal operations, meet service goals, and improve agent and customer satisfaction.

With these benefits in mind, let’s explore new game-changing capabilities from Amazon Connect that are transforming how contact centers optimize workforce.

1. Enhance scheduling by automating shift exchange

Amazon Connect now allows agents to exchange shifts with each other, providing greater schedule flexibility without compromising service levels. With the shift exchange feature, agents have the power to initiate shift trades seamlessly.

Using this feature, contact center supervisors can automate routine approvals while maintaining manual oversight for critical decisions, reducing administrative workload, and maintaining control standards. For example, supervisors can automate approvals for agents handling non-critical tasks, such as routine customer inquiries, while manually approving requests from agents who deal with more sensitive issues, like medical information, financial transactions, or escalated customer complaints.

Here are few scenarios when supervisor might setup automated approvals:

  1. Shift swaps between agents in the same skill group with equivalent language proficiencies during low-volume periods.
  2. Automated approvals for pre-approved agents who have historically maintained high performance metrics.
  3. Lateral trades among tier-1 customer support representatives with similar customer interaction ratings.

Here are few scenarios that might need manual approvals:

  1.  Cross-team shift trades involving specialized technical support agents with unique product knowledge.
  2.  Shift exchanges for high-stakes financial service representatives requiring additional compliance review.
  3.  Trades involving multilingual agents supporting critical international customer segments.

As an example, consider this scenario where agent John wants to swap his Friday shift with Paulo, who wants to swap his Tuesday shift. John can easily create a shift trade request on his own using the shift exchange feature.

2. Plan time off in advance

Agents using Amazon Connect can now schedule time off up to 24 months in advance, increased from 13 months. Supervisors can upload group allowance windows for scheduling groups up to 27 months ahead, also increased from 13 months. These extended timeframes help agents better plan their personal time and allow supervisor to more effectively manage future staffing needs.

The screenshot shows that group allowance for March 2, 2027, has already been set. No time off slots are available between 8 AM and 10 AM, but slots are open after 10 AM. Agents can use these available slots information to plan their time off accordingly and avoid getting their request rejected by the system.

3. Analyze your scheduling data using Amazon Connect data lake

Amazon Connect provides published forecast and schedules data in the analytics data lake, making it easier for you to generate reports and insights from this data. From agent schedules data in the analytics data lake, you can now automate key operational use cases such as generating reports for paid and unpaid hours for payroll, generating summarized views of how many agents are scheduled to work and how many have time off in a given time period. You can also address audit and compliance use cases such as generating a detailed report of all scheduled events for all agents for the past two years. To generate these reports and insights, you can use Amazon Athena with Amazon QuickSight or another business intelligence tool of your choice.

The following are few of the sample reports

Agent activity report

Provides a consolidated view of all shift activities across published schedules for all agents. As an example, agent user0100’s activities are displayed in the highlighted box for May 9, 2023, between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM.

Time off report

Employee time off reports, including the dates and number of hours (effective time off) taken for each time off request, and status of each request.

Please refer the agent scheduling analytics section of the workshop to see examples on how to generate these reports.

This data can also be integrated with your Outlook or Google calendar. It can also be integrated with your Human resources (HR) and payroll systems for tracking agent time off.

4. Enhance your staffing decisions with Amazon Connect’s new daily headcount projections

As a contact center supervisor, accurate staffing projections are crucial for providing the best customer experience. Amazon Connect now offers daily headcount projections in capacity plan downloads.

Previously, capacity plans provided weekly and monthly staffing projections. Now, you can access day-by-day headcount requirements for up to 64 weeks into the future. This view simplifies key staffing and hiring decisions, such as determining how many agents to bring on board while accounting for seasonal fluctuations and applying different shrinkage assumptions at a daily level.

This enhanced visibility allows you to review your staffing needs with greater precision. You can identify when you’ll need to ramp up or scale back your team to meet anticipated volume, and make informed decisions about hiring, training, and scheduling to ensure the right coverage.

This data is available in the “Daily Metrics” tab after downloading the capacity plan.

5. Customizing agent adherence tracking with Amazon Connect

In a global contact center, real-time analysts monitoring contact center health use real-time dashboards to get an at a glance view of how different sites/locations are performing on their adherence metrics. If one or more sites are in an alarm state (too many agents out of adherence), they notify regional supervisors. Similarly, supervisors at different levels (regional, divisional, team) monitor their org’s adherence metrics, real-time as well as historical. Low adherence rates lead to fewer agents being available to take contacts and has a direct impact on key business metrics including reduced service levels, increased abandonment rates, and increased average speed of answer. Ability to quickly identify which and how many agents are out of adherence and the ability to take actions to improve adherence is important to minimize impact to end-customer experience.

Consider an example where in an 8-hour shift, an agent adheres to their schedule 80% of the time, i.e., they were out of adherence for 96 minutes. Improving this agent’s adherence to 85% would mean this agent is now available to take contacts for 24 minutes more. Applying this to 1,000 agents, this represents 24K more minutes in a single day (2K contacts with an average handle time of 12 minutes) to handle contacts without requiring additional staffing.

Amazon Connect has introduced this customer adherence tracking that gives you more control over how you track agent adherence to their schedules. You can now choose which states an agent can be in while still being considered adherent to their schedule, allowing you to better match your unique operational needs.

With this launch, you can now define custom mappings between agent statuses and schedule activities. For example, the “Work” schedule activity can be mapped to multiple agent statuses, such as “Available” and “Back-office work.” This means that an agent scheduled for “Work” from 8 AM to 10 AM will be considered adherent if they are in either the “Available” or “Back-office work” status during that time.

Additionally, the real-time adherence dashboard now displays the actual names of the scheduled activities, rather than just “Productive” or “Non-productive.” This shows supervisors how agents’ current activities compare to their schedules, allowing them to take actions to meet service targets.

Below is an example that shows how custom status can be configured for the Lunch activity. To be considered adherent, agents must set their status to “Lunch” during scheduled lunch periods.

In this example, supervisors can monitor agents’ adherence status in real-time. An agent is marked “Adherent” when their current activity matches their scheduled status (e.g., both show “Lunch”). They are marked “Non-adherent” when their current activity differs from their schedule (e.g., showing “Available” when scheduled for “Lunch”).

These new features give you greater flexibility and precision in monitoring agent adherence. You can now customize the adherence tracking to better align with your specific business requirements, ensuring more accurate and meaningful insights into your contact center operations.

Call to action

Learn more about Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning and Scheduling and Amazon Connect analytics data lake capabilities.

Amazon Connect Administrator Guide helps you get started using Amazon Connect. Learn how to provision, configure, monitor, and scale a virtual contact center.

Learn Amazon Connect core concepts and earn a badge as communications specialist and developer with Amazon Connect Learning Plans and Badges.

Get hands-on with Amazon Connect Workshops that are designed to teach or introduce practical skills, techniques, or concepts which you can use to solve business problems.

Subscribe to RSS feed to get Amazon Connect Release Notes delivered to your inbox. Stay tuned for informative and inspirational Amazon Connect blog posts.

Release notes

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/amazon-connect-agents-exchange-shifts/
  2. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/01/amazon-connect-agent-time-off-scheduling-24-months-future/
  3. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/12/amazon-connect-agent-schedule-analytics-data-lake/
  4. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/01/amazon-connect-headcount-projections-plan-downloads/
  5. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/amazon-connect-configuration-states-agent-schedule/

Authors bio

Vikas Prasad is a Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services for WWSO Applications in Maryland, USA. In his free time he like traveling, cycling, trekking, reading books and family board games.
Prabhakar Rajasekar is a Specialist Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services for WWSO Applications  in Aachen, Germany. Besides helping customer in their digital transformation, you will see him spending time with his kids in the garden or in the woods.
Pavan Dusanapudi is a Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services for WWSO Applications in Manchester, UK. He enables customers to achieve business outcomes through Customer Experience solutions and digital transformation. In his free time, he enjoys family hiking, CrossFit workout, and finding inner peace.