Create a distribution

A distribution consists of one week’s worth of contact data for every 30-minute interval of the day. The data includes the following:

Column	Description
Contact Ratio	Percentage of the day’s total contacts for the interval. NOTE When exported, the contact ratio is expressed as a decimal, not a percentage. For example, a contact ratio displayed in the table as 2.03% is exported to a spreadsheet as 0.0203.
Contacts Distribution	The number of contacts received in the interval. If enabled on the Global Settings page (Enable Forecasted Contacts as Decimals setting), this value can have up to two decimal places.
Average Talk Time	The average talk or processing time.
Average Work Time	The average after contact work time.

The distribution determines the contact volume fluctuations within the intervals of a day.

This is how WFM generates a distribution:

WFM calculates the average number of contacts received in the reference period for each schedule interval for every day of the week selected in the distribution request. Days with special events are disregarded. Choose six to eight recent weeks for the reference period, taking care not to use a week with unusual volume, such as a holiday week.

EXAMPLE To calculate the average contact volume for the 8:30–9:00 AM interval on Monday, WFM takes the sum of the volume for the 8:30–9:00 AM interval for each Monday in the reference period and divides the total by the number of Mondays in the reference period.
WFM then divides the result for each half hour by the average number of contacts received for the entire day to determine the percentage of the day’s contacts that arrive during this interval.
WFM calculates the average talk time (interactive service queues) or processing time (non-interactive service queues) and after-contact work-time values per contact for each half hour.

EXAMPLE To calculate the average talk time/processing time for the 8:30–9:00 AM interval on Monday, WFM takes the sum of talk time/processing time for each contact between 8:30 AM and 9:00 AM for each Monday in the reference period and divides the total by the number of contacts. WFM uses the same method to calculate average work time.

The future does not always repeat the past. Future events can cause a contact distribution to change. If you know about upcoming events that might affect a distribution, you can edit the distribution to account for those events. For any 30-minute interval, you can change the number of contacts likely to arrive, the average talking or processing time, and the average after-contact work time (see Edit distributions and forecasts).

Guidelines for generating a distribution

Choosing an appropriate reference period is important for generating a distribution suitable for your forecast period.

You can generate a distribution once and reuse it for every forecast or generate a new distribution every time you generate a forecast. A distribution and forecast are linked automatically—a service queue can only have one production distribution and one production forecast at any given time.

The type of distribution that you generate depends on the type of service queue you are generating it for. Use the following guidelines when generating a distribution:

If your daily or weekly contact data fluctuate wildly, choose a longer reference period. If your contact data is fairly stable, choose a shorter reference period.
If your contact data is fairly stable or seasonal, choose a longer reference period from the same period last year.
If you have at least a year’s worth of historical data and your business and routing patterns have not changed dramatically, use a reference period from a year earlier that is similar to the forecast period.
If you have less than a year’s worth of historical data or your contact center conditions have changed dramatically, identify a more recent period that is likely to have contact data that is similar to the forecast period.
If the contact data is reasonably stable throughout the year, you might go several months without having to generate a new distribution.
If the contact data varies frequently or shows seasonal variation, you might need to regenerate your distribution at least once a month or every time you create a forecast.

NOTE Distributions ignore dates within your reference period that have special events assigned to them and dates that are tagged as closed dates.

Managing distributions

Use the Distribution Requests page to generate production and named distributions.

The production distribution is used by default to generate a forecast. There can be only one production distribution. In contrast, there can be many named distributions. Named distributions are used to analyze how different conditions affect contact volumes and agent schedules. A named distribution can be generated with historical data like a production distribution is, but it can also be generated without any historical data and then populated manually.

You can also use a named distribution instead of a production distribution to generate a forecast.

NOTE If you are confident that the contact volume and distribution at your contact center are stable, then you only need to generate one distribution and one forecast, and you do not need to use named distributions.

Generating a production distribution

Generate a production distribution

On the Distribution Request page, select the Submit a production distribution request option.
Select one or more service queues. The available service queues listed are those that do not have the “Do not generate forecasts or schedules for this service queue” check box selected on the Manage service queues page.
Enter the start date and end date of the desired reference period in the service queue time zone. The reference period should have historical data that closely resembles the dates for which you want to generate a forecast. There should be data for every selected day of the week in your reference period. If there is no data, WFM fills those periods with zeros.
Select the days of the week for which you want to calculate a distribution. By default, every day of the week is selected.
Decide if you want the service queue standard times (Average Talk Time and Average After Contact Work Time) to be updated based on this distribution.
Schedule when you want the request to run. By default, the request is run immediately.
Click Submit.

Once your request has run successfully, you can view the distribution and edit it as needed.

Generating a named distribution

Use the Distribution Request page to submit a named distribution request. The request can generate a new named distribution or overwrite an existing named distribution with new data.

Generate a named distribution

On the Distribution Request page, select the desired option: Submit a new named distribution request or Submit an existing named distribution request.
Select a service queue. Note that while you can select multiple service queues for a production distribution, you can select only one service queue for a named distribution.
Enter a unique name for the named distribution if this is a new request, or select the existing named distribution name if you are reusing an existing named distribution name.
Enter the start date and end date of the desired reference period in the service queue time zone. The reference period should have historical data that closely resembles the dates for which you want to generate a forecast. There should be data for every selected day of the week in your reference period. If there is no data, WFM fills those periods with zeros.
Select the days of the week you want to calculate a distribution for. By default, every day of the week is selected.
Decide if you want the service queue standard times (Average Talk Time and Average After Contact Work Time) to be updated based on this distribution.
Schedule when you want the request to run. By default, the request is run immediately.
Click Run.

Once your request has run successfully, you can view the distribution and edit it as needed.

Viewing a distribution

View a distribution

On the Planning page, select Distribution.
Select the service queue for which you ran the distribution.
Select the production or named distribution. The distribution appears in both tabular and graphic form.
Select the day of the week you want to view from the drop-down list. Alternatively, scroll the displayed data up or down and click the black bar at the bottom to view the next day’s data or the black bar at the top to view the previous day’s data.

NOTE The time zone for this service queue is also displayed. It is read-only and cannot be changed from this page. If the service queue time zone is changed on the Service Queues page, any affected distributions and forecasts should be rerun or manually edited, since the change of service queue time zone is not automatically reflected in them.

Working with distributions

Once you run a distribution, there are a number of actions you can take with it besides editing it. These actions are controlled by the buttons in the upper-right corner of the Distribution page. The button functions are described in the following table.

Not all buttons are available for both production and named distributions.

Button	Function
Save	Saves an edited distribution.
Save As	Saves a distribution with another name. This preserves the original distribution and creates a new named distribution.
Rename	Renames a named distribution. This function does not copy the distribution like the Save As function does, but rather changes the name of this distribution. Once changed, you will not see the old name in any list of named distributions for this service queue.
Delete	Deletes the named distribution.
Copy to Production	Copies the named distribution to production. This function overwrites the data in the existing production distribution with the data from this named distribution. For example, if the named distribution has data only for Monday and Tuesday but the production distribution has data for every day of the week, after the copy the production distribution will also contain data only for Monday and Tuesday.
Export	Exports the data in the distribution as a CSV file named export.csv. The export file contains the distribution data for every day of the week. This data can be manipulated in a spreadsheet application and then copied back into the distribution.