Back Office Planning

Call Centre Helper Forum » Call Centre Management

(3 posts)

I have recently been tasked to implement a full overview and re work of back office planning within our business.

This type of planning has been looked at in the past but never really got off the ground. I guess that as I am relatively new to back office planning (although been planning and forecasting for 6 years) what are the biggest challenges that I need to take into consideration.

I have made it clear to the business that this may take sometime before we get any real outputs and that the existing model will need to be overhauled to be tailored to each BO function. Thankfully the business understand this so that gives me a bit time to understand each work stream and what their objectives are.

Appreciate i maybe asking $65,000 question here but what is the best way to start????

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks

Posted 2 years ago

gbwindy

Hi SJT. A number of challenges here which I am also wrestling with. First off in the forecasting area is establishing a realistic forecast with adequate accuracy. This would probably work better in a forms processing environment than a marketing response area.

You then have the issue of establishing a reliable handling time for different work types - probably a time and motion study but there may be lots of interdependencies in back office activity.

Service levels are interesting because you have the concept of a backlog for lots of worktypes - you will want to plan for turnaround times greater than one day.

The final big one for me is monitoring intraday activity. A forecast may well be a start of day figure and you may want to find a way of tracking progress and productivity against that target. Initially the days forecast would need breaking down against intervals in a realistic way which coincided with working patterns rather than apply the working patterns to the incoming telephone call traffic!!

You'll be lucky to get change from $65,000 :-)

Posted 1 year ago

Coops

Me and my team have to plan for about 10 back office teams down to individual task level (approx 1500 in total) so I can appreciate how much work this can involve. We do have the luxury of all work coming into the centre is recorded at task level.

You will want to ensure you have measurements of what work you are currently getting so that tou can use this to build up a picture of what is business as usual, business events and marketing campaign activity. I agree that each task should be allocated a standard time, easier said than agreed and we've never been able to get SLAs to work with any level of accuracy as different tasks may have different turnaround times so we would predict the staff required to complete all work on the day it is received and provided that levels don't fluctuate too much, this will work itself out over a short period.

Whilst I know this forum is not for advertising and I'm not representing any company at all, there are a couple of systems available to record work being received and staff performance, works in a silimar way to a back office ACD but without the expensive workflow/BPM piece...

I hope your colleagues are patient as it took a couple of months to put something together when we had a few years worth of historic data!