Salaries soar for resource planners

Salaries for resource planners have soared in the past few years, with salary expectations rising to around £50,000 per year.  Guy Masters looks at what is driving this.

Ah, resource planning. That’s just a matter of making sure there is the right number of ears to phones… Right?

Wrong.

Resource planning can require an enormous amount of specialist knowledge and organisational skills. It involves forecasting, scheduling, budgeting, operational planning and intra-day planning – all of which come together to enable contact centres to prepare for events both within, and beyond, their control.

They also enable the provision of constructive MI, and allow this to be used in relation to customer journeys, value and frequency – meaning that the workforce management data can be ever more refined. With the growth of multi-channel contact centres, it’s important to have a solid resource planning function in place, so that shrinkage and attrition can be minimised and your agents’ skills best utilised.

We’ve seen dramatic growth in demand for resource planning professionals over the last five years, with a massive increase in spending, both on technology and people. This is largely because it’s a relatively new section of the market. While contact centres previously used Excel for resource planning (with many continuing to do so), more and more are using specialised workforce management tools which can provide a detailed view of your contact centre, and offer focused MI as a result.

The cost-saving benefits of an effective resource planning strategy can, potentially, be huge. After all, the biggest overhead of any contact centre is its people, and efficient planning of such a fundamental resource can be enormously cost effective in the long term.

It’s not just about cost, either – it’s about job satisfaction and interest for your agents. It’s possible to have a broad spectrum of agents, with some bored, and others cracking under the strain, creating an enormous disconnect in their expectations and the reality of their jobs. A good resource planner will enable you to ensure that the way work is distributed throughout your contact centre is both constructive and fair.

From a recruitment perspective, the need for planning specialists has grown dramatically. However, there is still a shortage of really high quality candidates. The demand still massively exceeds the supply because of the niche position it occupies in the industry. We’ve noticed that planners who, a year ago, came to us with salaries between £26-30k per annum are coming back to us now with salary expectations of around £50k.

Some contact centres do use structured skill transfer and training to develop and progress their resource planning team from agent level upwards, through a technical route of training – but this does require a huge leap in aptitude, and it’s not always possible to guarantee retention of these staff  members in the long term.

Similarly, one of the main problems our clients face when recruiting resource planning professionals is the difficulty in finding those multi-faceted, multi-talented planners who possess those increasingly important communication and stakeholder management skills. It’s essential nowadays for resource planners to be able to communicate effectively, with those at a very junior level often expected to communicate effectively and confidently, often to senior stakeholders both internally and externally.

Fundamentally, resource planning is about balance – balancing cost with performance, job satisfaction with productivity, and communication with technical aptitude. If you understand your resource planning function, and don’t underestimate its importance, you’re half way to achieving a real sense of balance in your contact centre – meaning both your staff and customers can be truly satisfied.

Guy Masters is Director at Cactus Search (www.cactussearch.co.uk)