Darren Deehan takes a look at where unsuccessful call centre workforce planners are getting it wrong.
1. Little understanding of basic calculations and KPIs
An unsuccessful workforce planner does not have a sound understanding of the basic call centre calculations – principles of Erlang and the variations. He doesn’t need to be a mathematical genius, but it helps if he can count!
The terrible workforce planner will also fail because he doesn’t know how to calculate KPIs: ‘Hey, what are KPIs anyway?’
2. Ignoring the latest trends
He is an awful workforce planner because, although he knows all the current trends in things like fashion, music, sport or the arts, he does not understand trends within forecasting, among other basic data analysis principles.
He also does not understand the theory of ‘cause and effect’ and the impact of ‘the power of one’.
3. Failing to prioritise properly
Planner by name but not by nature! The bad workforce planner is not good at prioritising.
The unsuccessful workforce planner will not be able to think on his feet and decide which are the most important tasks to complete first.
4. Being too nice
The workforce planner who is too nice will get eaten alive.
The workforce planner who does not succeed will not appreciate that, above all else, he or she must be single minded in the pursuit of meeting those KPIs, service level goals and management objectives.
Despite the deteriorating relationship with the team of new agents, if John the agent says, ‘Hey, Planner, can I have a holiday on Tuesday?’, the bad workforce planner will say, ‘Sure, no problem. What about Wednesday too?’!
5. Overlooking some of the necessary elements of requirement building
The awful workforce planner does not consider all the elements of requirement building. For example, Speed of Answer. OK – picture the scene, he has 100 calls per day, that is the forecast and it’s accurate. But he targets 50% as an abandonment rate, meaning he initially could abandon half his forecasted calls and have an equal or greater effect on the requirement that he needed. This results in a 50% reduction in staff requirement. He did this because he is a bad workforce planner.
6. Avoiding meetings with other departments
The bad workforce planner is not talking or meeting with other business departments to understand upcoming events. He stays boxed within his small office, with the door closed, the window blinds pulled, and voice mailbox already full for months and a computer packed with hundreds of unread emails.
Darren Deehan
He is too busy with scheduling tasks to be able to track local community news or major events in the city which will impact things like coverage, absenteeism and shrinkage.
7. “Playing dumb” about the presence and impact of new channels
The unsuccessful workforce planner does not embrace technological changes within his industry or have awareness of upcoming software updates and server life cycles.
He also ignores the rise of new channels, such as WhatsApp, and how best to capture those volumes for forecasting purposes.
With thanks to Darren Deehan at injixo
Author: Megan Jones
Published On: 4th Nov 2015 - Last modified: 18th Dec 2018
Read more about - Archived Content, Peopleware
