Nothing has a greater effect on reducing costs or improving service than simply getting the right number of agents to answer your calls. Its not easy to make sure that even 100 agents are occupied and over staffing by just 5% with as few people as this will cost you over 70,000 every year. Missing a service level target may cost you even more in lost customers. Your resource planning and workforce management team are the key to minimising your operating cost and improving your service, their skills and competencies are critical to your business.

So, resource planning skills are valuable to your business, but can you quantify them? Have you ever evaluated your staff to see how they measure up against the jobs they are expected to carry out? Do you understand where their weaknesses are so you can direct training appropriately? Do you know which individuals have critical skills so that unexpected absence does not affect your business? Does your team have the knowledge they need to implement current best practice and contribute to future strategy?

Results is a complete solution combining services, a proven method and a unique software skills management system. Together these will enable you to identify and develop the skills, knowledge and motivation needed to get the most from your resource planning team. Results will also help you to successfully manage and maintain skills within your planning team to improve consistency and maintain performance benefits over time.

The first stage of the Results programme identifies the competencies that all of your resource planning team needs to be successful within your contact centre. This list of competencies forms the basis of a skills framework that is input into a web based skills management system called Sntrel. Using Séntrel your staff are then assessed to gauge their abilities relative to the skills identified as being essential for your business. The assessment will identify skills gaps giving you a comprehensive training needs analysis (TNA) for your staff so you can plan effective development for them.

Skills frameworks can be specially built for you and based on our previous work with the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP) in the US or the Professional Planning Forum (PPF) in the UK. If you do use one of these proprietary skills frameworks we can also let you know how your staff score against industry averages across the globe.

Skills frameworks will typically cover generic skills that your planning team should have including topics such as forecasting and scheduling. In addition the framework may also cover areas that show an individuals understanding of resource planning within the context of the contact centre, including how absenteeism may be affected, managing shrinkage, the benefits and pitfalls of managing adherence, handling multiple skills and knowledge of working time regulations etc.

Generic skills are not dependent on the software that is frequently used to carry out workforce management and forms the core competencies of resource planning. However, to accomplish a role successfully individuals frequently need specialist knowledge of the systems that your organisation uses to carry out workforce planning. This specialist system knowledge can be incorporated into your skills framework so that you can be sure those tasked with forecasting, scheduling and intraday management have the capabilities they need.

Managers within your planning team can also have specific skill frameworks. Skills for managers may include use of key performance indicators like schedule efficiency to manage resource planners as well as understanding the benefits of advanced concepts like multiskills and virtualisation so they can contribute to organisational strategy and help optimise your contact centre.

Where skill gaps are found we can design and deliver training to boost skill levels, or you can provide this yourself. We can also provide training for your own staff so that they can develop and deliver effective training interventions themselves.