Transforming Mercado Libre’s contact center planning with Anaplan

Mercado Libre transforms contact center planning with AI-powered forecasting—achieving 80%+ accuracy for 4 million monthly inquiries across 18 countries.

Since 1999, Mercado Libre has built Latin America's leading e-commerce and fintech ecosystem. Operating across 18 countries with a complete suite of solutions for buying, selling, advertising, credit, insurance, and payments, they've transformed how millions of people access commerce and financial services.

But managing customer experience at this scale brings massive operational challenges.

The challenge: 4 million inquiries, countless complications

Mercado Libre's Customer Experience team faces an enormous task: responding to more than 4 million customer inquiries every month across all their regions and countries. The complexity was creating serious problems:

• Staffing mismatches everywhere: Either insufficient agents unable to handle all inquiries, or excess agents driving up operational costs unnecessarily
• Inefficient allocation: Agents weren't being deployed optimally across different regions, languages, and time zones
• Planning limitations: Traditional forecasting methods couldn't handle the volume, variety, and velocity of inquiries across their diverse markets
• Operational blind spots: Lack of granular visibility into demand patterns made it nearly impossible to plan effectively

For a company focused on using world-class technology to create intuitive solutions, their own workforce planning was falling behind their customer experience ambitions.

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The solution: AI-powered planning transformation

Mercado Libre partnered with Keyrus to implement Anaplan with PlanIQ, bringing machine learning and AI capabilities to their contact center planning. The approach was comprehensive rather than piecemeal—instead of addressing isolated issues, they focused on connected planning across the entire organization.

The implementation used an agile methodology to deliver a world-class contact center planning solution:

• Advanced Forecasting: PlanIQ's machine learning capabilities analyzing statistics, AI, and historical patterns to predict demand with unprecedented accuracy
• Intelligent Optimization: Anaplan Optimizer enabling precise agent allocation at both daily and hourly levels against forecasted demand
• Granular Analysis: Detailed forecasting capabilities providing visibility that was previously impossible to achieve
• Connected Planning: Streamlined data connections linking CX plans with detailed P&L and broader business operations
• Real-time Capabilities: Instant scenario creation and comparison for dynamic decision-making