Why your forecast accuracy metric matters more than your forecast
Most contact centers report forecast accuracy using MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) — but MAPE has a fatal flaw: it treats every interval equally regardless of volume. A 50% miss on a 10-call overnight interval counts the same as a 5% miss on a 500-call peak hour. This makes MAPE unreliable for operations with any volume variation. WAPE (Weighted Absolute Percentage Error) fixes this by weighting each interval's error by its share of total volume. High-volume intervals — where staffing decisions actually matter — get proportional influence. This tool lets you explore both metrics with your own data, see how they diverge, understand the mathematical floor of accuracy (Minimal Interval Variance), and determine which metric actually reflects your forecasting quality. If you're being held to a MAPE target, you may be chasing noise in low-volume intervals while ignoring real accuracy problems during peak hours.