Written by Guest Blogger Colin Whelan, Senior Contact Centre Planning Specialist at the Professional Planning Forum.  

The Professional Planning Forum (www.planningforum.co.uk) is the independent industry body for effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry, working across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals.  Championing the importance of these critical skills, the Planning Forum is widely recognised for its best practice research and case studies, as well as the results focused nature of its professional development training and in-company workshops.

Take a look at any call centre planning job on the market today and you’ll find a dizzying array of requirements.  Now, in increasing numbers of cases, employers are also looking beyond the call centre.  They’ve seen the gains to be made by bringing exceptional planners into their customer service environment and want to replicate their skills in the back office as well.

The problem, however, is that back office activity is inherently different to front office operations.  Instead of matching staffing levels to a call demand profile, back office planning is about creating a demand profile that suits the staffing levels already in situ.  It’s not aboutqueue management, it’s about workload management – and this, for many
planners, is a relatively untested area.

In fact, by following a four-step process, planners can not only get to grips with back office planning, but can actually start making as much of a difference there as they do in the call centre.  The fours steps are Process, Data, Planning and Performance Management.

• Process – Understand your processes and their complexity
• Data – You need to determine what level of detail you require from the data you’re capturing in order to ensure that each of those processes outlined in step one becomes as streamlined as possible and can be measured
• Planning – It is at this stage that a planner will be able to produce forecasts for workloads, start tracking targets and begin scheduling according to individual back office workers’ abilities
• Performance Management – Here, a planner will need to identify productivity, not only in terms of the individuals carrying out the work, but also the effectiveness of the processes those individuals are carrying out.

The reality is that defining processes and capturing data will only give you a snapshot of what’s happening in the
back office.  Equally, planning will only give you a tool to effectively resource the demands you’re anticipating. To
create a really streamlined back office environment, planners need to go one step further; they need to analyse all the
facets of steps one to three to identify what is being done well and, conversely, what aspects could be re-engineered and how.

Strategically focused planners are arguably the best people to support this process re-engineering work. But even the best planners in the country will not succeed if they don’t, right from the outset, have a firm grasp of what their success criteria are.