At a glance
The Challenge
The company’s WFM environment had become highly customized and difficult to maintain, while forecasting was still done entirely in spreadsheets. Manual seasonal adjustments and growth rates increased time spent, error risk, and sustainability risk when forecasting ownership was single-threaded.
- Customer: A leading U.S. wireless service provider
- Number of agents: TBD
- Industry: Telecom
- Aspect Solutions: Aspect Workforce
The Solution
Aspect partnered with the company through a Concepts + Design Workshop to modernize forecasting and workforce planning. The team transitioned forecasting into Aspect, simplified and stabilized the configuration, and implemented IDP staffing tooling and tolerances so operations teams could enter planned exceptions and self-serve schedule requests.
The Impact
- Faster migration to modern forecasting: 100% Aspect forecasting reached by end of Q4 2025, two quarters early.
- Lower WFM workload: 50% reduction in WFM ticket workload from November 2025 to March 2026.
- Better forecast accuracy: Forecast variance improved from -12% to within ±5% in three months.
- More sustainable operations: Reduced risk from single-threaded ownership through a repeatable process.
The organization
A leading U.S. wireless service provider serves approximately 4.5 million customers. The company handles 1M+ monthly customer contacts, making forecasting accuracy critical for staffing and budget planning.
The provider has been an Aspect customer for approximately 10 years, using Aspect WFM and testing the new Workforce experience (including the mobile app).
Motivation for change
Over time, the company’s WFM environment became highly customized and difficult to maintain due to years of incremental changes.
At the same time, forecasting was performed entirely in spreadsheets, with manual application of seasonal factors and growth rates before importing data into Aspect for downstream processes.
This created several challenges:
- Increasing complexity with limited governance and best-practice checks
- Manual forecasting workflows that were time-consuming and error-prone
- Sustainability and coverage risk due to single-threaded forecasting ownership
- Underutilization of Aspect’s forecasting capabilities
Forecast: 4.96
Scheduled: 3.00
Net: -1.96
Updated: 5 minutes ago
Why Aspect
The company partnered with Aspect through a Concepts + Design Workshop to modernize and simplify its forecasting and workforce planning processes.
The team’s goals were to:
- Transition from spreadsheet forecasting to 100% Aspect forecasting
- Build a repeatable process that could be maintained and staffed when the forecaster was unavailable
- Simplify an overly complex configuration into a more maintainable environment
The Concepts and Design Workshop helped us simplify what was broken and move to 100% Aspect forecasting by the end of Q4 2025, well ahead of our original timeline. It gave us a repeatable process we can maintain, not a one-off fix.
The Results
Reduced WFM ticket workload by 50%
By implementing IDP staffing tooling and tolerances, operations supervisors were able to enter planned schedule exceptions and self-serve schedule requests.
- 50% reduction in WFM ticket workload from November 2025 to March 2026
- Ticket counts represent manual schedule adjustments, and continued adoption has kept requests trending down
Improved forecast variance from -12% to within ±5%
After implementing Aspect Forecasting in late December 2025, the team rapidly improved forecasting accuracy.
- Reduced forecast variance from -12% to within ±5% in three months
- Improved maintainability and reduced operational risk from single-threaded ownership
What stood out
- Strong alignment with a customer-service orientation and company values
- Delivery that felt smooth without being over-managed
- Strong alignment with a customer-service orientation and company values
- Unexpectedly fast resolution of long-standing issues
- Migration to Aspect forecasting was completed 2 quarters ahead of schedule
Looking ahead
With a more stable, repeatable foundation in place, the team can focus on using the tool rather than continuously correcting it.
Next areas of focus include:
- Continued exploration of new capabilities, including WFX and AI forecasting tools
- Adoption/rollout of the new Workforce experience
- Benefits expected to reach approximately 2,000 agents
Call volume
Key learnings
- Simplifying existing processes can deliver faster value than starting over completely.
- Embedding forecasting and staffing workflows directly in Aspect improves maintainability, scalability, and business continuity.
- Enabling operations teams with self-service tools reduces manual work for WFM teams and drives measurable efficiency gains.
“The biggest win was getting out of the manual work cycle. With IDP in place, operations teams can submit schedule requests and get answers immediately, and we cut the WFM team’s ticket workload by about 50%. It’s been a huge shift in day-to-day efficiency.”
