Scenarios and What-If Planning
The Scenarios tab lets you model how your staffing and cost would change under different assumptions — without touching your main plan. It is where you stress-test your operation, prepare for known events, and build business cases for decisions.
What Is a Scenario?
A scenario starts from your current staffing assumptions and lets you override one or more of them. Turnella recalculates requirements and cost for the scenario and shows the difference versus your base plan.
Scenarios are completely independent — creating or changing one does not affect your main plan or any other scenario. You can have as many scenarios as you need.
Creating a Scenario
- On the Scenarios tab, click New scenario.
- Give it a descriptive name. Be specific: "Q4 peak — +25% volume" is better than "Scenario 1".
- Set the overrides you want to model. Any assumption not overridden keeps its base value.
- Optionally add notes explaining the business context or the decision this scenario is helping to inform.
Available overrides
| Override | What it changes | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Volume uplift (%) | Percentage change applied to the forecast volume | +25% for a campaign week |
| Headcount delta | Extra agents added to or removed from the schedule | +5 for a hiring scenario; −3 for a freeze |
| AHT change (seconds) | Change to average handle time | −30s for a process improvement |
| Service level target | Change the SL target for this scenario | 70% to model a relaxed target |
| Max occupancy | Change the occupancy guardrail | 80% to model a stricter wellbeing policy |
| Shrinkage (%) | Change the shrinkage assumption | 35% to model a period of high absence |
Reading Scenario Results
Each scenario card shows the full planning picture for that set of assumptions:
- Assumptions applied — the overrides, highlighted to show the delta from base
- Agents needed — peak seated and peak scheduled requirement
- Weekly cost and cost per contact
- Coverage %
- Impact versus base — e.g., "Requires 6 more agents and costs £3,200 more per week"
The comparison table puts all scenarios and the base plan side by side. Better than base is shown in green; worse in red. This is the format to use in a management presentation when you need to show decision-makers the trade-off between cost and service.
Common Scenario Use Cases
Peak demand planning
Set volume uplift to +20% or +30% to model a campaign, seasonal peak, or product launch. The scenario tells you exactly how many extra agents you need and what it will cost. Run this 4–6 weeks before the peak to allow time for recruiting or scheduling adjustments.
Process improvement modelling
If you are implementing a new knowledge base, a revised call script, or a coaching programme expected to reduce AHT, model the headcount saving before committing to the investment.
Example: a 30-second AHT reduction on a 200-seat contact centre at 80% occupancy saves roughly 10–12 FTEs. At £25,000 per FTE per year, that is a £250,000–£300,000 annual saving. This is the kind of business case number a scenario produces in 30 seconds.
Hiring freeze or absence spike
Use headcount delta (−5) or raised shrinkage (35%) to model what happens to service level if you lose staff unexpectedly. The scenario shows how far SL and coverage fall, which helps you make the case for contingency resource (temporary staff, overtime) before the situation occurs.
Service level target trade-off
Model what happens if you relax the SL target from 80/20 to 70/30. The headcount reduction is often material — but so is the customer experience risk. A scenario table makes the trade-off explicit and defensible.
AI Narrative Summary
When the AI feature is configured, each scenario card includes a plain-language summary generated by Claude. It describes the scenario's trade-offs in one or two sentences — e.g., "A +25% volume uplift requires 6 additional agents and increases weekly cost by £3,200. Coverage falls from 97% to 89% without the extra resource."
The summary is generated on demand when you open the scenario card. It pulls only from your workstream data — no external information is used.