TMCnews Featured Article

March 05, 2011

Workforce Management Focus at RCCSP Professional Education Alliance's New York Call Center Training Event

By Brendan B. Read, Senior Contributing Editor

The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance is sponsoring an intensive 14-course call center training and certification event in New York City March 28-April 2011 at the Sheraton LaGuardia.

Two of these call center training and certification courses are focusing on the vital area of workforce management; having the right people at the right time is the key to effective and efficient contact center-delivered service, support, sales, collections and research. These courses are Fundamentals of Call Center Workforce Management, which is taking place March 30-March 31 and the Workforce Management Professional Certification Boot Camp, which is being held March 30-April 1.

The Fundamentals of Call Center Workforce Management, which spans two days, focuses applying necessary principles of workforce management to overcome daily challenges of forecasting calls, scheduling staff, and managing service levels in call centers/contact centers. Attendees will learn:

--How to forecast, including a look at data collection and interpretation, as well as the recommended forecasting techniques used by support centers
--How to calculate the staffing required in a call/contact center to meet service goals, and the many service and cost tradeoffs involved in staffing decisions
--How to schedule staff, including the difficulties faced by call centers today in matching the workforce to the workload, and best practice options on scheduling the workforce and managing service on a real-time basis

The training is designed around case study problems that cover typical forecasting and scheduling scenarios. It looks at complications in today’s environment such as skill-based routing, handling of other media contacts such as e-mail and text chats, and staffing for a mixture of inbound and outbound calling.

“The Fundamentals of Call Center Workforce Management training course is designed for professionals involved in staffing the call center, balancing workers and workload, or meeting call center service level targets,” says Nina Kawalek, ceo RCCSP Professional Education Alliance. “Whether you have a few agents or many, workforce management software or none, you will benefit from this introductory workforce management course.”

The Workforce Management Professional Certification Boot Camp, conducted over three days under the guidance of workforce management authority Margaret Klenke, teaches each and every step in this process. These include forecasting, scheduling, and real-time respond strategies and tactics for optimizing costs, coverage and service levels.

Working with hands-on case problems, attendees will apply new knowledge to realistic situations that reinforce learning. They will see first-hand how theory is applied to real situations, including some of their own staffing scenarios.

Here are the learning takeaways:

--How to forecast, including a look at data collection and interpretation, as well as the recommended forecasting techniques used by support centers
--How to calculate staffing, taking into account shrinkage, and coverage components like shift spans, days off, and start/stop options
--The art of balancing goals, and balancing the needs of the center with the needs of the staff
--How to schedule staff, including the difficulties faced by call centers today in matching the workforce to the workload, and best practice options on scheduling the workforce and managing service on a real-time basis
--How to handle scheduling complexities and aberrations, and how to take skill-based routing into account when forecasting, scheduling, and adjusting agent pools
--How to optimize staffing and react to changes, monitoring intra-day variations, and effecting reaction strategies
--The science of workforce management: everything from analyses and trending, variation and deviation, calculations and correlation, modeling and more
--How to perform a workforce management audit to effect continuous WFM improvement

The Workforce Management Boot Camp utilizes lecture and peer-to-peer discussions that are interspersed with hands-on labs and live demonstrations. Using real-world workforce management tools attendees will practice daily forecasting and scheduling tasks and devise solutions to service level challenges. The entire third day of the course will focus on optimization techniques that they can use immediately to reduce costs, improve service and performance levels. With them they can manage the complexities of skill-based routing, e-mail and web chat contacts and a mixture of inbound and outbound calling.

“Whether you have no workforce management experience or years of experience, no tools or the most sophisticated software, 10 agents or 10,000, the case problems, techniques, materials, and reporting methods presented here are equally useful and applicable,” says Nina Kawalek, ceo RCCSP Professional Education Alliance. “You will leave this seminar confident in your mastery of workforce management principles and the practical application of workforce management techniques.”

Brendan B. Read is TMCnet’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard

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