Read how Call Centre Helper investigate the mysterious metric of contact centre spin and explain why it can be such a headache for contact centre planners.

If ever there was a time for good planning, this is it. This pandemic has been without doubt ‘disruptive’. Not only do we need to respond ‘in the moment’, but it can also be a positive catalyst for rethinking our operating model and strategic objectives.

How well did you plan for Christmas? Did you accurately forecast your workload? Did you “fairly” allocate annual leave? Were your customers happy; were your colleagues happy? Or, was is just a case of survival and now you are only thinking about January, February, March and the next budget cycle?

To turn insight into action we need to effectively communicate and get people bought into our ideas. Analysts with both the technical skills to interpret data and the communication skills to get people engaged are few and far between. Why is that?

The classic hair dresser question “have you got any holidays booked?”, probably as most people have a holiday and most people like to talk about their next planned adventure. Not only that, it is a legal entitlement. However, too often the annual leave process can be “clunky”, an all-round problem, administrative heavy and unfair.

KPIs underpin our goals, from a customer, strategy and performance perspective, so we can track how effective we are in achieving our objectives. Moreover, KPIs help us define our resource requirements and may be very different for digital channels from telephony.

Too many people and organisations don’t have an accurate, trusted picture of the future or a consistent understanding of what business as usual (BAU) means. This leads to problems, as perception and subjectivity project the wrong version of tomorrow.

One of the questions I have been asked most often through my career in customer service is “how should our planning team be structured?” This is generally accompanied by some more detailed questions like “should real-time be part of planning or part of the operational team”, “should MI and Planning be together”, “should we have one planning team for everyone or many planning teams, one for each line of business”? If I could only come up with a standard model that fits any organisation, I could save a lot of time and make a lot of money!

It’s been reported for a while that the apprenticeship levy is not reaping the rewards it set out to when introduced in 2017.

Its been an exciting year for the Standards Benchmarking programme with a diverse range of organisations being peer assessed to provide a bespoke roadmap of improvement. We also recognised three organisations at this Customer Strategy & Planning conference for demonstrating best-in-class for Planning. In addition, we now have accredited the first organisation from the Data, Analytics & Insight Standards.

Are you ready to take your forecasting to a new level? Trust arises from the depth and quality of our analysis. But don’t forget the basics. Paul Jackson-Moss shows how engagement and communication is fundamental to understanding what in the business could affect your analysis.

Everybody hurts when Real-Time management fails, yet “sweetness follows” when there is a unified approach with pre-agreed reactive decisions.  The Forum’s Standards Benchmarking programme has identified that best-in-class behaviour happened when the planning function has a fundamental aim to be the “nerve centre” of the operation through giving increased coverage, increased capability whilst improving operational control. 

There is plenty of evidence that happy agents mean happy customers and staff turnover hurts the bottom line by thousands of pounds. Gain top tips in this short popular conference presentation

Get an add-on for Excel to help with staffing calculations. Phil Anderson gives some top tips on using it.

Planning for averages results in average planning! Averages have their value, but we need to think beyond averages to plan for peak performance. In forecasting, especially, there is no single ‘best way’ to forecast, because good planners need to get under the surface to understand what is driving the numbers.