Limit number of contacts to percentage of agent's capacity

[teresa_abbate]

Hi all,
i'm optimizing a campaign group made of 2 selection campaigns.
CAMP1 --> TargetA
CAMP2 -->TargetB

I'd like limit the number of contacts of each campaign to a percentage of agent's capacity.
Suppose that customers of TargetA use the 40% of their agent's capacity and customers of TargetB use the 60% of their agent's capacity.
Where can I define this constrain?
Do you have suggestions?

Thanks,
Teresa

[Erin_SASCI]

Hi Teresa,

Have you tried adding an Agent Unit Usageto your Communication Table?  See the attached for an example of applying this using an Agent Channel example - highlighted.  Let me know if this helps and answers your question.

Thanks,

Erin

[teresa_abbate]

Hi Erin,

thank you for your answer! I've tried to change the value of agent communication Unit Usage but nothing changed. I'm not sure I understood how to estimate this value: D
In the exemple of
Camp1 -> COMM1 -> targeta
Camp2 -> COMM1 -> TargetB
supposing that the customers of TargetA and TargetB have the same agent "AgentX" with time_period = 03March2017 and capacity = 100,
how can I set the unit_usage for COMM1/ COMM2 communications in order to obtain 40 customers of targeta for COMM1 and 60 customers of TargetB for COMM2?

Thank you,

Teresa

[Erin_SASCI]

Hi Teresa,

I have two thoughts to try.

1.  Agent Channel Constraints using the communication code - see attached.

2.  Define each of the agents as a separate channel.  This would allow you to have more flexibilty to use different ratios per agent. 

If these don't help you arrive at the solution you are hoping for, please respond again, and I will investigate further by asking others. 

Thanks,

Erin

[teresa_abbate]

Hi Erin,

thanks for your advice! Unfortunately both thoughts are not usable in my case:

1)  Agent Channel Constraints using the communication code --> we don't know the capability of each agent (avery day they change)

2) Define each of the agents as a separate channel --> there are thousands of agents

However I found very interesting your suggestion about the value of unit_usage and I would learn more.

From the user guide, I understood that this value may represent the average time used by agents for each communication and it may not be null.  

In the attached picture, my Agent data Input table shows: time_period= today and Capacty=max number of communication for each agent for today.

Considering the same example, but with unknown agent's capacity : 

Camp1 -> COMM1 -> TargetA  (Agent1 time_period=today Capacity=X)
Camp2 -> COMM2 -> TargetB  (Agent1 time_period=today Capacity=X)

How can I estimate the unit_usage value for each communication in order to obtain:

number of contacts for COMM1= 40% of Agent1 Capacity (40% of X),
number of contacts for COMM2= 60% of Agent1 Capacity (60% of X) ?

 thanks,

Teresa

[Erin_SASCI]

Hi Teresa,

I have asked my colleague, Patricia Neri, to take a look at this to see if she has some suggestions for you.  I think she will be able to help you resolve this. You should hear from her soon. 

Thanks!

Erin

[PatriciaNeri]

Teresa and Erin,

Because the answer to your questions are long and detailed, I wrote an article with many photos and instructions. It will be posted tomorrow (Thursday( by the SAS Communities Coordinator.

The post is titled: How to Write Constraints that Use Percentages in SAS Marketing Optimization

Best,

Patricia Neri

[PatriciaNeri]

Teresa and Erin,

The concepts of unit_usage and capacity need to be cleared up:

Each agent has a unit_usage and capacity. Unit_usage specifies, on average, how much of the agent is used for each communication that uses that specific agent, and capacity indicates what is the max limit that each agent can be used during each time period when the optimization will run.

Sometimes the concepts are easier to understand if we have a concrete example. Let’s assume that the campaigns are optimized daily, and that the agent's unit_usage is 0.25 (per agent) and his capacity is 4 per day. That means, that a call from this agent takes approximately 0.25 hours (or 15 minutes), and the agent is available for 4 hours of calls, which means that he could reach up to 16 customers per day.

For people who want some details on how to write constraints with percentages, but don’t need to see the complete post I wrote on How to Write Constraints that Use Percentages in SAS Marketing Optimization, here are the main steps:

1) Define Indicator variables

2) Define calculated variables using the Indicator variables defined in step #1

3) Create constraints using the variables defined in the previous two steps

4) Optimize the scenario

5) Test the constraints are doing what you expect by running code in Enterprise Miner for example

For the example provided in the post the results are as expected, 60% of agents capacity go to campaigns in group One, and the remaining 40% agents capacity go to campaigns in group Two (yes, each group could consist of just one campaign)

Best,

Patricia

[BeverlyBrown]

Hi @teresa_abbate, here is a link to @PatriciaNeri's article, How to Write Constraints that Use Percentages in SAS Marketing Optimization.

[Erin_SASCI]

Thank you Patricia and Beverly!

[teresa_abbate]

Very helpful article! Thank you very much!