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Turnella Features Guide

A complete overview of every major feature in Turnella, organised by tab.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is your planning home screen — a portfolio view of all your workstreams at a glance.

Summary cards (top):

  • Peak headcount across all workstreams combined
  • How many workstreams are scheduled
  • How many have active warnings
  • Combined weekly labour cost

Workstream cards: each card shows the health grade (A–D based on coverage), key metrics (peak requirement, coverage %, cost per contact), and the next recommended action.

Alerts panel: flags specific issues — coverage below 80%, peak deficits, budget variance, SL risk, and forecast accuracy degradation.

Quick actions: Create new workstream, view all alerts, jump to any workstream.

Data Tab

CSV upload: accepts any CSV with a date-time and volume column. Auto-detects common column names. Manual column mapping if auto-detection fails.

Demo data generation: creates 8 weeks of synthetic inbound voice data with realistic intraday and day-of-week patterns. Useful for exploring the tool before importing real data.

Data quality checks: flags missing intervals, volume outliers (>3 SD above mean), and duplicate timestamps.

Manual entry: add individual observations without a CSV.

Export: download all observations as CSV.

Forecast Tab

Multiplicative decomposition model: separates demand into four components — base level, trend, day-of-week index, and intraday profile. Produces interval-level forecasts with P10/P90 confidence bands.

Forecast horizon: 2, 4, or 8 weeks ahead.

Manual overrides: adjust individual intervals or apply bulk percentage changes to a date range. Overrides are preserved on regeneration.

Event multipliers: configure date-specific volume multipliers for known events (Black Friday, billing cycles, campaigns).

Contact deflection: model the impact of self-service reducing inbound volume over time.

Accuracy snapshots: lock a forecast before the period passes, then compare to actuals automatically once the data arrives. Computes WAPE, MAPE, Bias, and % within 5%/20%.

Confidence indicators: High/Medium/Low per interval based on data availability, stability, and horizon.

Staffing Needs Tab

Three staffing models:

  • Erlang C (voice): multi-server queueing formula for inbound telephone calls
  • Concurrency model (chat): accounts for agents handling multiple simultaneous sessions
  • Backlog throughput model (email/back-office): calculates FTE to keep up with arrivals and clear any existing backlog within an SLA deadline

Key outputs:

  • Seated required (agents actively handling contacts)
  • Scheduled required (seated ÷ (1 − shrinkage))
  • Coverage % across all planning intervals
  • Health grade (A–D)
  • Predicted service level per interval
  • Backlog clearance days and SLA breach risk (email/back-office only)

Sensitivity panels: show headcount at ±30–60s AHT, ±10–30% volume, and higher shrinkage.

Intraday and DOW charts: visualise the requirement curve for a typical day and by day of week.

Live assumption editing: change any input directly on the tab; requirements recalculate instantly.

Schedule Tab

Shift templates: define named shifts with start time, end time, break minutes, days of week, headcount, role, and optional custom rate.

Headcount suggestions: when editing headcount for a shift, Turnella suggests the number needed to close the current unstaffed gap during that shift's hours.

Coverage chart: blue (scheduled) vs grey (required) lines with green/red shading for covered/uncovered intervals.

Gap recommendations: lists the largest coverage gaps with suggested fixes, extra agent counts, and cost impact.

Named schedule plans: save and switch between multiple staffing plans for different periods (normal week, peak, holiday cover).

Plan comparison: show two plans side by side to present options to stakeholders.

Break deduction: break time is automatically deducted from coverage, reflecting the real productive hours per shift.

Roster planner: assign named agents to each shift's slots, week by week. Auto-fill balances each agent's hours and rotates who works which shift; a rotating rota generator cycles teams through shifts over a set number of weeks; split shifts are an opt-in rule. Manual assignment shows live eligibility (availability, whole- or partial-day time off, skills, contracted hours, consecutive-day and rest rules). Slots that can't be filled are flagged.

Exports: shift-pattern CSV / Excel / .ics, plus a per-agent roster as Excel (one row per assignment + per-agent hours) and .ics (one dated event per agent, named).

Cost Tab

Weekly labour cost: scheduled agent-hours × loaded hourly rate (base + on-cost + applicable premiums).

Cost per contact: weekly cost ÷ weekly contact volume — the primary labour efficiency metric.

On-cost uplift: employer costs (NI, pension, holiday pay) added to the base wage as a percentage.

Role rates: different rates for different roles (Agent, Senior Agent, Team Lead) linked to shift templates.

Shift premiums: configurable night and weekend uplifts applied only to qualifying shifts.

Budget tracking: RAG status bar showing spend vs weekly target.

Monthly and annual projections: order-of-magnitude projections from the weekly figure.

Cost sensitivity table: shows weekly cost at different hourly rate assumptions.

Scenarios Tab

What-if modelling: create any number of independent scenarios with overrides on volume, headcount, AHT, SL target, max occupancy, or shrinkage.

Comparison table: all scenarios vs base plan side by side — better is green, worse is red.

AI narrative: plain-language trade-off summary for each scenario (requires AI configuration).

Common use cases: peak demand planning, process improvement ROI, hiring freeze impact, SL target trade-off.

Insights Tab

Surfaces the most important findings automatically. Panels shown adapt to what data is available:

  • Service level risk — at-risk intervals with root-cause attribution (volume, AHT, or coverage)
  • Occupancy risk — intervals above the max occupancy guardrail
  • Volume trend — growth/decline rate and 4-week outlook
  • Hiring and attrition alerts — hiring need to maintain and grow FTE against attrition
  • Annual headcount plan — 52-week FTE projection
  • Backlog panel — for email/back-office: backlog size, clearance rate, SLA breach risk
  • AI narrative — plain-language briefing across all panels (requires AI configuration)

Roster Tab

Agent records: name, role, contracted hours/week, days available, skills tags, notes.

Time off: book vacation / sick / training / other as date ranges per agent; enforced as ineligibility in the roster planner.

FTE calculation: contracted hours ÷ 40 = FTE. Sum across all active agents gives total contracted FTE.

Scheduled vs contracted FTE: shows variance between what the schedule requires and what the roster can deliver.

Skills matrix: grid view of which agents have which skills, with counts per skill.

CSV import: bulk-add agents from a spreadsheet.

Archive: soft-delete leavers without losing historical data.

Reports Tab

Executive summary: consolidated view of all key metrics — status, demand profile, staffing, SL analysis, forecast quality, cost breakdown, assumptions, and anomalies.

Management narrative: rule-based 2–3 sentence plain-language summary always shown — headline status, coverage, forecast accuracy, and recommended next action. No AI configuration required.

Exports: CSV (12-week performance scorecard), PDF (via browser print → Save as PDF). For Excel and .ics exports, use the Schedule tab.

Free Calculators (turnella.com/calculators)

20 standalone tools, no login required:

  • Voice staffing (Erlang C)
  • Live chat staffing (concurrency)
  • Email/ticket staffing (backlog model)
  • Multi-channel combined staffing
  • SL target comparison (70/20 vs 80/20 vs 90/20)
  • Productive capacity
  • Shrinkage
  • AHT impact on headcount
  • Cost per contact
  • Overtime vs temp vs hire comparison
  • Attrition cost
  • Contact deflection ROI
  • Bradford Factor
  • First call resolution impact
  • Forecast accuracy (WAPE/MAPE/Bias)
  • Shift coverage planner
  • FTE to headcount converter
  • Occupancy calculator
  • Service level simulator
  • Backlog clearance planner

Help Chatbot

A floating help button (bottom-right corner, on every page) opens the Turnella Help assistant. It answers questions about how the app works, what the metrics mean, and how to use specific features. It is powered by Claude Haiku and retrieves answers from Turnella's own documentation — it will not guess or make up features.

Starter prompts appear when you open the chat for the first time: "What does WAPE mean?", "How do I import data?", "How does Erlang C work?", "What is shrinkage?" Click any chip to pre-fill the input, then press Enter.

The chatbot is context-aware: if you are on the Staffing needs tab, it prioritises explanations relevant to requirements. If it cannot find an answer in the documentation, it directs you to support@turnella.com.

The session limit is 30 messages. Use the refresh icon in the chat header to start a new conversation.

AI Features

Turnella includes optional AI features powered by Claude (Anthropic). When configured:

  • Insights narrative — plain-language briefing of the most important findings
  • Scenarios narrative — trade-off summary for each what-if scenario
  • Reports narrative — executive summary in 2–3 paragraphs

AI features require an Anthropic API key configured in Vercel. They use Claude Haiku 4.5 to minimise cost. A monthly spend cap is enforced by the database — the AI is automatically disabled when the cap is reached. Contact support@turnella.com to configure AI features.