Over the last two weeks I’ve been presenting at G-Force in Melbourne and the Government Contact Centre Summit in Sydney. It’s been great to meet lots of new Workforce Planners and to help answer many of your questions as well as share best practice Workforce Management techniques with you. From the feedback I’ve received, it seems that most Workforce Planners are self taught and have received little or no skills training in this area. This is consistent with our findings in the Fifth Quadrant 2011 WFO Benchmark Study which will be launched next week in Sydney and Melbourne. It seems that only 50% of Workforce Planners have actually received skills training in Forecasting, Scheduling or their Workforce Management software. It’s also interesting to note that only approximately 1/3 of the Workforce Planners in Australia and New Zealand attend User Groups or Workforce Management events. So how are people learning what they should do in this important role? It seems a lot of people have been following the processes put in place by their predecessors regardless of whether these seem to be working or not. Many of the reports used are being run because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” Google and the internet are other ways that people have been searching for information in the hope of finding out more. The most popular books seem to be Call Centre Staffing: The Complete, Practical Guide to Workforce Management by Penny Reynolds and Call Center Management on Fast Forward by Brad Cleveland. These tools are great, however without networking with other Resource Planners and attending courses it’s difficult to ask questions and make sure that you thoroughly understand the different Workforce Planning concepts and are putting them in place correctly. Fifth Quadrant have recently partnered with the world’s leading contact centre training provider, The Call Center School, so that we can combine our local knowledge and stats on best practice Workforce Management and Quality Assurance to provide customised training to meet your needs. If you’d like more information, please give me a call.

On another note, we’d love to hear from you if you have successfully utilised a productivity measure other than a set AHT target. What are you using and how has this implementation gone?

I look forward to catching up with you on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.