Ticket Volume Forecaster & Staffing Planner

The problem this kills

Monday your queue is on fire and everyone's drowning. Friday afternoon half the team is staring at an empty dashboard. The volume was always going to do that - you just didn't have it in front of you when you built the schedule.

Most support teams "forecast" with a gut feeling and last week's totals. That misses the real shape of demand: the Monday-morning surge, the lunchtime dip, the spike every time billing runs or a promo drops. So you either overstaff and burn budget, or understaff and blow your SLA - and you can't defend either number when someone asks "why four agents and not three?"

This Implementation Plan builds you a tool that reads your own history, learns the day-of-week and hour-of-day pattern, lets you add the spikes you know are coming, and tells you exactly how many agents each shift needs to hit your SLA - with every assumption visible so the plan holds up in a budget meeting.

What you'll build

A private, login-protected web app where you:

• Load your ticket history (date, hour, channel, volume) from a CSV or Google Sheet.
• See the demand shape - a forecast of expected tickets per hour and per day, built from your seasonality (day-of-week and hour-of-day patterns) plus trend.
• Add known events - launches, promos, billing cycles, holidays - as adjustments the forecast applies on top of the baseline.
• Get a staffing recommendation - required agents per interval, computed from your handle-time, occupancy, and SLA targets.
• Review and adjust - tweak any assumption and watch the required staffing update, so the number is yours, not a black box.
• Approve and export - a manager signs off, then the approved plan exports as a clean CSV you can hand to whoever builds the actual roster.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A complete, paste-and-go runbook you drop into Claude Code - no prior coding needed.
• It opens by interviewing you about your business - your channels, your busy and quiet patterns, your SLA, how your CSV columns are actually named, and the spikes you already know about - then tailors the data model and the math to your team. This is not a generic template; the tool is shaped around how you actually run support.
• Step-by-step build prompts you copy and paste, each one ready to run.
• The full forecasting and staffing logic explained in plain language, so you understand and can defend every number.
• A "No API yet?" fallback: read your history from a Google Sheet / CSV and write the staffing plan back out as CSV - so it's fully buildable today with zero integration work.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a throwaway script - it's an internal tool built the way a real ops tool should be:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own data.
• A full audit trail - who loaded what history, who changed which assumption, who approved the plan, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the tool drafts the forecast and staffing plan, but a manager reviews, adjusts, and approves before it becomes the official schedule basis. Nothing gets published on the AI's say-so.
• Duplicate guards - the same forecast period can't be processed or published twice.

Who it's for

Support managers and workforce planners who own the schedule and the SLA - the people who get the heat when the queue blows up and need a staffing number they can actually defend.

You don't need to be a developer. If you can run a support team and answer questions about how it works, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.