Professional Planning Forum celebrates 10 years

ppf-10th-ann-185 Next week, the Professional Planning Forum, is celebrating it’s 10th Birthday.

Set up 10 years ago by founder Paul Smedley, its ambitious aims were to promote professionalism ‘where numbers meet people’ in the contact centre industry. Today, the role of planners is well established and the contribution they make to improve customer experience has spread beyond the traditional boundaries into back office and outbound operations and further.

Launched in London on March 22nd 2000, membership numbers are now over 1600 and through the best practice programme of research, best practice and networking events professionals are involved from every sector.

Paul Smedley

Customer Contact Planning 2010, will be the venue for the Planning Forum’s main birthday celebrations. From little more than fifty people in 2002, this April the footfall at Birmingham NEC’s Hilton Metropole is expected to be over 500 delegates.

Paul Smedley, Executive Director, puts the success down to the relationship between members and the planning forum team. “People who join the Forum are passionate about improving their operations and are constantly looking to us to share new ideas and learn about what works in other places.”

Today the Planning Forum is beginning to see the status of planning becoming recognised at increasingly strategic levels of the organisation, and have recently set up a director’s forum to promote greater understanding.

A massive change in the planning profession over the past decade is that it is now possible to see yourself as having a career in planning in many organisations. Equally some senior planners choose to move into wider management roles and others to follow a technical career path in business analysis, IT or telecoms.

New and existing members are invited to join us for this 10th Anniversary at Contact Centre Planning 2010 held this year in Birmingham on 19-20 April, entitled Passionate about Performance – Planning to be the Best.

17 Mar 2010

Filed under Call Centre News